Poem of the Day: ‘Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford’

The American author Daniel Galef (b. 1995) recently published “Imaginary Sonnets,” a collection of poems with speakers that range from the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to the ancient Greek poetess Nossis the Epizephyrian. And the inspiration for rendering in sonnets the traditionally long poetic form of dramatic monologues? It came, he has explained, from the underappreciated work of the Victorian poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton in an 1888 collection also titled “Imaginary Sonnets.” So when the Sun decided to print another of Lee-Hamilton’s nearly forgotten works, we naturally turned to Mr. Galef to choose and introduce the sonnet. Living in Cincinnati, where he teaches English, Mr. Galef’s poetry has appeared in such journals as Atlanta Review, The Lyric, and Modern Age, and his fiction, nonfiction, and humor in many other publications.Guest editor Daniel Galef writes:Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907) is ripe for rediscovery, as The New York Sun noted when it ran his sonnet “Sea-Shell Murmurs” as a Poem of the Day this past March. A late Victorian poet with ties to Gothic Romanticism, he seems — like, say, Alma Mahler (1879–1964) or John Polidori (1795–1821) — one of those people the Germans call Randfiguren: historical figures who tend to pop up repeatedly on the periphery when we study other, more prominent people.But Lee-Hamilton deserves more. He had a modest career in the British diplomatic service, first in France, then in Portugal, before he collapsed and found himself paralyzed in 1873 at age twenty-eight. His condition was never satisfactorily diagnosed (it may have been psychosomatic), and he remained bedridden at a villa in Florence for twenty years before recovering as mysteriously as he had fallen ill. It was during this long convalescence — spent, he said, in “the posture of the grave” — that he began to compose poetry.One of the results was his 1888 collection, “Imaginary Sonnets.” Every poem in the book is given in persona: a dramatic monologue from the perspective of various real or imagined historical figures. The most obvious precedent is Walter Savage Landor’s 1829 prose work, “Imaginary Conversations.” But Lee-Hamilton was also following closely in the footsteps of the Brownings. His poems, in both style and substance, place themselves in the tradition of the impassioned dramatic monologues of Robert Browning (1812–1889) and the flowery Italian forms of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861).The figures Lee-Hamilton selected for his mouthpieces vary from giants (Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus, Napoleon) to more obscure figures unearthed from footnotes and apocrypha. Thus, for example, Mademoiselle de Sombreuil (1768–1823), a noblewoman forced to drink a goblet of blood to save her family from the guillotine. Or Fallopius (1523–1562), the Italian anatomist-priest after whom fallopian tubes are named, and Pierre de Chastelard (1540–1563), a Frenchman so madly in love with Mary, Queen of Scots that he was executed after being discovered hiding underneath her bed — twice.Like many of the Victorians and Romantics — and who are the Victorians but the Romantics after being made to grow up and get a job? — Lee-Hamilton had a weakness for the grotesque, the Grand Guignol stories from popular histories of what he lovingly called “the dark and stormy centuries” (a phrasing that is as clear an admission of Gothic feeling as I have ever seen). His subjects include a surfeit of suicides, poisoners, despots, and mad artists, and a contemporary reviewer chided him for being “over-sanguinary, over-ghastly.”Lee-Hamilton knew that sonnets are traditionally love poems, and his dramatic monologues do not feel like love poems. But there is more than one kind of love, and perhaps the characters in this book are filled with love — in the way that a patriot in his sonnets loves his country, a sovereign loves his subjects, a revolutionary loves Liberty, an aristocrat apprehended by revolutionaries loves her own liberty, an addict loves his drug, a pirate loves his gold, a prisoner loves the rats that are his only companions, an explorer loves the undiscovered wonder, a man loves his dog, an artist loves his art, and a narcissist loves himself. The speaker in the sample sonnet I’ve chosen for The New York Sun claims to love the woman she addresses, even as she plans her destruction. She loves her the way the viper loves the dove. The players in the sonnet are the wife and the mistress of Henry II, who in legend finally meet in the king’s secret labyrinth beneath the palace — where the queen stalks her rival and presents her with a choice between murder and suicide.Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford. (1160).by Eugene Lee-HamiltonThou trembling lamb, round whom I move and move In ever smaller circles day by day, Watching thy every motion: let none sayI love thee not, — more than my heaven above!Oh, there is nothing like the panting love With which the tigress closes round her prey! Men call it hate; I call it love at play;The yearning of the viper for the dove.When thou art dead, I’ll come, be not afraid, And feel the softness of thy braids of gold,The roundness of thy throat that so sweet sang;And I shall feel, when once my hand is laid Upon thy breast, and finds it clammy cold,Each nail become a claw, each tooth a fang.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford’

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