The result of three years of work, the poem tells the Greek myth of Hero and Leander, two lovers, and the story of their forlorn fate.
Dealing with themes of love and its attempt to conquer nature, the poem does not contain the political message that many of Hunt's works around that time do.
The collection was well received by contemporary critics, who remarked on its sentiment and delicacy, while more modern writers such as Edmund Blunden have criticised the flow of its narrative.
The poem begins with a description of worshipping Venus, the Greek goddess of love, and the celebration of the physical world:[4] The hour of worship's over; and the flute And choral voices of the girls are mute; And by degrees the people have departed Homeward, with gentle step, and quiet-hearted; The jealous easy, the desponding healed; The timid, hopeful of their love concealed; The sprightlier maiden, sure of nuptial joys; And mothers, grateful for their rosy boys.
(lines 193–204) The poem removes any emphasis on idyllic nature to describe the sublime:[6] Meantime the sun had sunk; the hilly mark, A-cross the straits, mixed with the mightier dark.
In the end, Hero kills herself and there is no metamorphosis as found in other versions of the story:[9] She went up to the tower, and straining out To search the seas, downwards, and round about, She saw, at last,—she saw her lord indeed Floating, and washed about, like a vile weed; On which such strength of passion and dismay Seized her, and such an impotence to stay.
[9] In The Religion of the Heart, Hunt argued that "It was a great mistake of the nurturers of Christianity to preach contempt of the body, out of a notion of exalting the soul.
"[13] Hunt, in the Indicator essay, wrote in response to the views expressed in William Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With Us": "It was a strong sense of this, which made a living poet, who is accounted very orthodox in his religious opinions, give vent, in that fine sonnet, to his impatience at seeing the beautiful planet we live upon, with all its starry wonders about it, so little thought of, compared with what is so ridiculously called the world.
[15] In terms of religion, Hunt returns to a mythological theme because, as he argues in The Indicator essay "Spirit of the Ancient Mythology", "Imagine Plutarch, a devout and yet a liberal believer, when he went to study theology and philosophy at Delphi: with what feelings must he have passed along the woody paths to the hill, approaching nearer every instant to the divinity, and not sure that a glance of light through the trees was not the lustre of the god himself going by!
[17] The collection containing Hero and Leander was well received by contemporary critics with the London Magazine devoted a lengthy analysis to the works.
[20] Nicolas Roe argues that "Hunt's couplets can create sudden surges of energy [...] and, elsewhere in the poem, they prolong the moment when dawn slowly reveals Leanders drowned body".
[21] Although praising many of the beginning lines of the poem, Rodney Edgecombe claims, "Good though that is, the verse from this point onwards lacks distinction; Hunt's material has deprived him of the sort of stimuli to which his imagination ordinarily responds—he is never at home with sublimity and terror.