In the 1827 volume, Poems by Two Brothers, he quoted a line from the Ovidian ode, "Sappho to the absent Phaon"--"Te somnia nostra reducunt |You my dreams bring back to me~"--as an epigraph to his own lyric, "And ask ye why these sad tears stream." Very late in his career, in the 1886 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, Tennyson referred to Sappho simply (and supremely) as "the poet," alluding to her fragment on Hesperus, "Fespere, pavta ferov, osa faivolic, eskedhas'
auoc, / fereic, oiv, feres aiya, fereis apu materi paidha," in the line "Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things" (185).