In Tristram of Lyonesse he speaks of “Sweet Love, that art so bitter,” and in Anactoria:
My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes
Blind me, thy tresses burn me ...
His poems have many Sapphic echoes. In his youth he poured several of Sappho’s fragments into the melting pot of Anactoria, where she is a nerve-racked woman, torn by passion, sensuous and lascivious, altogether too “Sapphic.” The rhetoric in his lines is gorgeous, but he loses much of Sappho’s emotional power. “That one low, pellucid phrase,” as Mackail calls the line, “I say that one will think of us even hereafter,” is expanded into:
Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine
Except these kisses of my lips on thine
Brand them with immortality; but me—
Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea,
Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold
Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold