Love comes in many different forms. Whether it be within a man and woman, man and another man, or woman and another woman; love is feeling compassion and happiness with another person. Sappho makes it clear that love is truly based on feelings and emotions. She continuously uses metaphors throughout each of her poems to portray love. In Poem 16, the first line says “Some men say and army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love” (Poem 16, 1-4). Love is something that brings her happiness and when there is no love and her heart is broken, she wishes to be dead. Sappho is quite the opposite from Lysistrata whom wishes to create a pact with the women of Sparta and Athens to withhold an important element of love, sex, from their husbands. Lysistrata isn’t very empowered by love and thinks of herself as an independent individual rather than a shadow behind a man or spouse for that matter.
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You’re right to insist on a couple of things: the massive differences between a heroine like Lysistrata, who is almost entirely taken up with ideas and only passingly acknowledges erotic desires; the profoundly passionate experience of love that Sappho describes to us, which may or may not be an aspect of a voice she takes on as a poet (not that this matters all that much because we have so little evidence left of her besides these fragments). You’re also correct that for Sappho love is primarily a matter of violent and inconsistent feelings–it may move quite quickly from those of “compassion and happiness,” as you say, when the person is around to suicidal feelings when he or she is absent–which sets her very much apart from what we might gather about love from either The Odyssey or Plato (though perhaps she and Catullus have something in common, hence possibly explaining why he wrote a poem inspired by her). I’m glad you both considered the personal experience of reading her work and analyzed a specific passage. Good work!