Quote by Sappho: “The moon has set and the Pleiades. It is midnight. Time passes. I lie alone.”

In just a few stripped-back images — the moon gone, stars gone, time moving — the speaker captures what it feels like to be wide awake and utterly alone at night. There is no dramatizing, just the quiet weight of loneliness laid bare.

Sappho composed this fragment in archaic Greece, likely around 600 BCE, on the island of Lesbos. Women in ancient Greece led largely private, domestic lives, and Sappho's poetry stands out as a rare record of female interiority and desire from a world that rarely preserved women's voices.

Ancient Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, active around 600 BCE. Considered one of the greatest poets of antiquity, she wrote intimate poetry about desire, beauty, and love. Only fragments of her work survive, but her influence on Western lyric poetry is immeasurable.