The theme of love is what makes me enjoy this poem so much. The portrayal of a first love between youths who believe that anything is possible, who are driven by their instincts and accept that perhaps it doesn't run as smoothly as it should makes this poem a classic transcendent of it's time.
Leander's almost abusive treatment of Hero is a massive fissure in the text for me though. He pulls her and chases her, gets her into bed and fights to keep her there. Hero's avoidance of him sets her up as the hunted and provides an uncomfortable point of uncertainty in the character. Leander's dominance is what defines him and makes him the attractive protagonist, however it is also presented as a deterrent by the narrator.
The narrator is never explicitly set up as male; the ambiguity of the narrator's sex means that the "homoerotic" attention paid to Leander is unfounded. The narrator's gender is indistinguishable therefore whether the erotic ideas applied to either character is "heterosexual" or "homosexual" is unfounded. The poem's attention to the character's bodies and the language it subsequently uses is doubtlessly eroticising both the characters and the events.
The turning point in the text is post-climax (pun intended): "That mermaid like unto the floor she slid" (l. 799). Without this comic moment the poem would be less than a two dimensional suck-up to the Classics. There's a human-humility of this moment - a tense post-coital exchange is what the reader's expecting, or perhaps another romantic moment, - the tension and passions are broken with a very natural accident. It's comical in juxtaposition with the heightened passions of the previous moments and very explicitly beautiful.
When I was revising this text it was one line that made me spiral back into love with this classic text. A line so good Shakespeare quoted it in As You Like It: "Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?" (l. 176).
Because first love is just that blind and just that dependent on seeing someone.
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