Sappho's fatal love for Phaon, told by Ovid and put into English verse by Pope, is transformed by Mary Robinson into a narrative sonnet-sequence. It is an unusual and arresting use of the sonnet, made the more striking by her choice not of the usual Shakespearean form, with its final rhymed couplet, but of the Petrarchan version preferred by Milton. In Milton's hands it was a majestic instrument. In Mary Robinson's it becomes a sensuous, Keatsian vehicle for a poem of passion and power.