Long before anyone wrote about butterflies in the stomach, Sappho wrote down exactly what it feels like to want someone across a room. Fragment 31 is a clinical, almost frightening inventory of the body in the grip of desire.
A list of symptoms
Watching the person she loves laugh with someone else, the speaker reports what happens to her: her tongue breaks, a thin fire runs under her skin, her eyes go dark, her ears drum, sweat pours, she trembles, and she feels "greener than grass" — close to death. It reads less like a love poem than a medical report. That precision is why it still lands: everyone recognises the physiology, even 2,600 years later.
It survives by accident
Almost all of Sappho's work is lost. We have Fragment 31 largely because a first-century-CE critic known as Longinus quoted it in his essay On the Sublime as an example of great writing. Much of what we know of the greatest lyric poet of antiquity reaches us through other people's footnotes.
Wear it
Our Sappho tee carries the fragment in Greek and English, with a lyre motif and the surviving lines on the back. The oldest description of desire we have, on garment-dyed cotton.