The Works of Eugene Lee Hamilton

Eugene Lee-Hamilton
1845-1907



Eugene Lee Hamilton was a late Victorian English poet. His work includes some notable sonnets in the style of Petrarch. He endowed a literary prize administered by Oriel College in Oxford University, where he was a student. The prize is open to students of Oxford and of Cambridge University and continues to this day.

His technical quality and flair for story-telling have perhaps not received the attention they deserve. He spent much of his adult life suffering from an undiagnosed illness that almost certainly had at least a psychological component; he was nursed by his mother and sporadically by his half-sister, Violet Paget, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. Lee-Hamilton lived in Italy during his illness, and it was only after his mother died in 1896 and he recovered that he was able to travel again, eventually marrying the novelist Annie E. Holdsworth in 1898 and fathering a child, Persis Margaret, in 1903.

Lee Hamilton is located firmly in the tradition of shorter Victorian verse; it is in the narrative and dramatic form that Lee Hamilton’s strengths lie, most especially in the dramatic sonnet. The poet draws most especially upon the work of Robert Browning, but Lee Hamilton further refines the art of the dramatic monologue. In contrast to his illness, there is a restless imagination to his sonnets. In particular Imaginary Sonnets (1888) draws upon a wide range of historical, mythic and imaginary figures; the programme of the sequence is that all of the sonnets are spoken by a particular person at a particular time. Philip Hobsbaum (in Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form) suggests that Lee Hamilton’s Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894) is the only Victorian sonnet sequence that can compare to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lee Hamilton’s story telling abilities are displayed in the gripping and suspenseful longer poems of collections such as the New Medusa (1882), narratives and dramatic monologues that explore the darker side of life.

Like Robert Browning, Lee Hamilton’s works are concerned with the rougher edges of humanity; lust, jealousy, and fear dominate, rather than love. The shadowy edges between religion and atheism, sanity and madness, love and hate, are what seem to fascinate the poet. Certain motifs are used repeatedly in pursuit of depicting these states, submersion in water, being buried in the earth, being shackled, the conflict between body and mind, murderous female archetypes such as the gorgon, and male archetypes such as the madman or the murderous lover. Lee-Hamilton has an unfortunately greater tendency than Robert Browning towards the morbid and the grotesque. Too often, Lee Hamilton shows us an image or plot that loses force because it lacks restraint.

His greatest works are his sonnets, and his greatest asset his technical ability. Lee Hamilton condensed the dramatic monologue into a sonnet format, and used the short traditional format to add power to his poetry. The better sonnets are concise and restrained in their construction.




Wood Song

When we are gone, love,
Gone as the breeze,
Woods will be sweet, love,
Even as these.

Sunflecks will dance, love,
Even as now,
Here on the moss,love,
Under the bough.

Others unborn, love,
Maybe will sit
Here in the wood, love,
Leafily lit;

Hearking as now. love,
Treble of birds;
Breathing as we, love,
Wondering words.

Others will sigh, love,
Even as we:
'Only a day, love,'
Murmurs the bee.




The Eagles of Tiberius

They say at Capri that Tiberius bound
His slaves to eagles, ere he had them flung
In the abysses, from the rocks that hung
Beetling above the sea and the sea's sound.

Slowly the eagle, struggling round and round
With the gagged slave that from his talons swung,
Sank through the air, to which he fiercely clung,
Until the sea caught both, and both were drowned.

O Eagle of the Spirit, hold thy own;
Work thy great wings, and grapple to the sky;
Let not this shackled body drag thee down.

Into that stagnant sea where by-and-by,
The ethereal and the clayey both must drown,
Bound by a link that neither can untie!



The Death of Puck

i

I fear that Puck is dead, — it is so long
Since men last saw him;— dead with all the rest
Of that sweet elfin crew that made their nest
In hollow nuts, where hazels sing their song;
Dead and for ever, like the antique throng
The elves replaced: the Dryad that you guess'd
Behind the leaves; the Naiad weed-bedress'd
The leaf-ear'd Faun that loved to lead you wrong.

Tell me, thou hopping Robin, hast thou met
A little man, no bigger than thyself,
Whom they call Puck, where woodland bells are wet?
Tell me, thou Wood-Mouse, hast thou seen an elf
Whom they call Puck, and is he seated yet,
Capp'd with a snail-shell, on his mushroom shelf?

ii

The Robin gave three hops, and chirp'd, and said:
'Yes, I knew Puck, and loved him; though I trow
He mimick'd oft my whistle, chuckling low;
Yes I knew cousin Puck; but he is dead
We found him lying on his mushroom bed —
The Wren and I,— half covr'd up with snow,
As we were hopping where the berries grow,
We think he died of cold. Ay, Puck is fled.'

And then the Wood-Mouse said: 'We made the Mole
Dig him a little grave beneath the moss,
And four big Dormice placed him in the hole.
The Squirrel made with sticks a little cross;
Puck was a Christian elf, and had a soul;
And all we velvet jackets mourn his loss.