Loeffler derived his inspiration for the work from the eighth eclogue of Virgil, in which a maiden of Thessaly uses magic to revive her lover's ardor once he has deserted her.
poem | symphonic poem | Pagan Love Song | Pagan Altar | Metamorphoses (poem) | Oberon (poem) | Exodus (poem) | Trivia (poem) | Symphonic poem | Rokeby (poem) | Psyché (poem) | Pagan's Mind | Ode (poem) | Mont Blanc (poem) | Little Gidding (poem) | Endymion (poem) | Dave Pagan | Winter Poem | ''Wenn der Rapp bleht in Piddaschwald'', a poem in the dialect of Peterswald-Löffelscheid | Ulysses (poem) | The Wild Party (poem) | The Whale (poem) | The Soldier (poem) | The Road Not Taken (poem) | The Poem Tree | The Pagan Winter | ''The Overthrow of Apollo and the Pagan Gods'', watercolour, 25 x 19.3 cm, 1809. The figure of Apollo in this illustration is a combination of the Apollo Belvedere | The Man from Snowy River (poem) | The Garden (poem) | The Dream of Gerontius (poem) |
His best-known works include the symphonic poems La Mort de Tintagiles (after Maeterlinck), La Bonne Chanson (after Verlaine), A Pagan Poem (after Virgil), and Memories of My Childhood (Life in a Russian Village), as well as the song-cycle Five Irish Fantasies (to words by W. B. Yeats and Heffernan), and the chamber works Music for Four String Instruments and Two Rhapsodies for oboe, viola and piano.