Of cut roses and broken hearts...
I find his poems to be an amalgam of the mournful, lovelorn work of John Dowland, mixed with the very best of the English Décadents. He is tasteful and always has an eye toward harmonious aesthetics within his poems, which makes them all the more devastating, considering their fatal tone.
XXXVI. "A cut rose set in water, poor sick wraith"
A cut rose set in water, poor sick wraith,
Survives a little while in hectic bloom,
A ghostly body in a living tomb:
E'en as a love-sick maid it lingereth
Feeding its passion with protracted death;
While through the very wound that wrought its doom
It draws unnatural nourishment: the room
Is long time fragrant with its dying breath.
How slow life droops away cut off from thee,
But cannot wither, though inch by inch it dies!
Torn cruelly from love's mutilated tree,
Through my heart's wound I drink what grief supplies
Of waterish sustenance, salt as the sea;
And all the night is heavy with my sighs.
John Barlas, (pseud. Evelyn Douglas), Love Sonnets, 1889.