The Queer Language of Flowers
By Niamh Burns
Sappho’s Violets
Perhaps one of the oldest queer symbols, the violet has been linked to lesbian love for over two thousand years. Sappho, or ‘Psappha’ as she would have called herself in her native Aeolic dialect, was a native of Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, around the sixth century BCE. Living ‘independent of masculine control’ (Edmonds, 10), Sappho cultivated deep emotional and erotic bonds with the women around her, bonds that were said to embody ‘a purity that cannot be misunderstood or cavilled away’ (Johnson, 46). Known as ‘the greatest of passionate lyric poets’ (Johnson, 30), Sappho wrote nine books of lyrical poetry – although less than 400 lines survive today. Those fragments, however, are drenched in queer and floral imagery, revealing a world where desire and nature entwine as freely as the garlands she so often wrote about.
One fragment, written to Atthis – a young woman believed to have been one of Sappho’s lovers, frequently referred to as ‘my darling’ throughout Sappho’s works – reads as follows:
And how many wreaths of the violet
And the sweet rose together met
You’ve bound about your hair,
And round your pretty throat how plenty
Chains of a hundred flowers and twenty
(Edmonds, 17)
Another fragment reads:
You culled violets and roses, bloom and stem,
Often in spring and I looked on as you
Wove a bouquet into a diadem
(Sappho, 25)
Not only did Sappho fill her poetry with flowers – especially violets – she was so frequently seen adorned with them that the violet became inseparable from her image. Alcaeus, another poet from Lesbos who was said to be ‘passionately in love with Sappho’ (Wharton, 18), addressed her as:
Violet-weaving, pure, soft-smiling Sappho
(Johnson, 10)
Other translators offer a slight variation:
Violet-crowned, pure, softly smiling Sappho
(Johnson, 74)
Whatever the case may be – whether she was violet-weaving, violet-crowned, or something in between – there is no denying Sappho’s deep association with the violet. Her passionate poetry about women and her close ties to the natural world have woven her deeply into the fabric of queer cultural memory. Her imagery of lovers in floral garlands and crowns captures a kind of intimacy that transcends time. Both her name and her nationality have become synonymous with women loving women: sapphic and lesbian, respectively. Over time, violets became symbolic not just of Sappho, but of love itself. In The Language of Flowers, a popular nineteenth-century book by Kate Greenaway, violets are described as representing faithfulness, modesty, and rural happiness.
The association between violets and sapphic love carried forward into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reappearing in both literature and theatre. Most notably, Édouard Bourdet’s 1926 play, The Captive, staged in both Paris and New York City, told the story of Irène and her ‘forbidden love’ for an unnamed woman. The play was infamous for being ‘the first staged play in the United States about a lesbian relationship – a daring subject for a play in the 1920s!’ Throughout the play, Irène’s lover sends her several bouquets of violets, including one in the final act that marks the end of their relationship. Performances of The Captive were shut down in New York after less than a year due to public outrage, but in Paris, women were said to pin violets to their lapels as a show of support and solidarity.
On Streatham campus, wild violets flourish from October to May. These violets, untamed by neat flowerbeds, seem to echo the very queerness they have long symbolised: they resist domestication, thriving on their own terms. In this way, the wildflowers embody a gentle defiance to normative structures, a kind of queer flourishing that refuses to be boxed in. Like the legacy of Sappho herself, they grow freely and boldly, rooted in resilience and blooming with unapologetic beauty. Their presence is a living reminder that queerness, like wild violets, thrives best when allowed to flourish beyond boundaries.
Bibliography/further reading
- Edmonds, J. M. Sappho : In the Added Light of the New Fragments : Being a Paper Read before the Classical Society of Newnham College, 22nd February 1912. Deighton, Bell & Co, 1912. Available in Special Collections Archive, University of Exeter.
- Greenaway, Kate. The Language of Flowers. Merrimac. Available in Special Collections Archive, University of Exeter.
- Johnson, T. G. Sappho the Lesbian : A Monograph. Williams and Norgate, 1899. Available in Special Collections Archive, University of Exeter.
- Loudon, Jane. The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower-Garden, Being an Alphabetical Arrangement of All the Ornamental Plants Usually Grown in Gardens & Shrubberies with Full Directions for Their Culture. 5th ed., Bradbury & Evans, 1849, and Aaron Poochigian. Stung with Love : Poems and Fragments. Penguin, 2009., and Henry Thornton Wharton. Sappho : memoir, text, selected renderings and a literal translation. Lane, 1895. Available in Special Collections Archive, University of Exeter.
- https://www.basilrathbone.net/theater/captive/index.htm
- https://daily.jstor.org/four-flowering-plants-decidedly-queered/
