I’ve written several poems in an English approximation to Sapphic stanzas. I think the most successful so far is an ecological poem published in Acumen. You can read it by clicking here https://acumen-poetry.co.uk/edmund-prestwich/

For those who don’t know what the Sapphic stanza is, it’s a form strongly associated with and perhaps invented by the Archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos. Greek poets composed in long and short syllables. English poets writing Sapphics almost invariably replace these longs and shorts with stressed and unstressed syllables. The Sapphic stanza then consists of four lines, three of eleven syllables and one of five. Indicating a stressed syllable by / , an unstressed one by x and a syllable that can be either stressed or unstressed by a, the pattern goes

/ x / a / x x / x / a

/ x / a / x x / x / a

/ x / a / x x / x / a

/ x x / a

To show it in a more concrete way, here’s a stanza from Swinburne’s ‘Sapphics’, on which I largely base my own approach:

So the goddess fled from her place, with awful
Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;
While behind a clamour of singing women
Severed the twilight.

I find writing in Sapphics difficult – their falling rhythms don’t come naturally in the way rising iambic and dactylic ones seem to. So why do it? Largely because it’s a very beautiful form. The sense of having achieved a hard-won beauty brings a special kind of pleasure, and the distinctiveness of the form makes the piece stand out in my own mind. But I think there are other significant rewards to working in a form that goes against the grain of one’s normal rhythmic habits. For one thing it creates a kind of detachment. It makes language a more resistant medium and makes me feel rather as I imagine a sculptor might eliciting an idea from a block of stone. At the same time, you’re trying to express ideas and feelings that are important to you, and the difficulty of doing so in this alien rhythm forces you to move around these ideas in a more strenuously reflective way than you would do if writing in a freer way. Like any composition in a strict form it gives an armature around which your thoughts, feelings and phrases can gather, but it does so in a more challenging way than writing in a fully naturalised form like the sonnet would do.

There’s a kind of free verse approach to sapphics which involves simply following three longer lines with a short one, perhaps with a predominance of falling rhythms. This can be very beautifully done, as for example by Stanley Lombardo in his versions of Sappho’s own Complete Poems and Fragments from the Hackett Publishing Company.