If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision: that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes. Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you say, and well you might. Though familiar to a handful of scholars of the Victorian era, and the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity. Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” Sonnets, particularly Petrarchan sonnets like “Sea-Shell Murmurs,” comprise most of his poetry. His subjects tended toward the historical dramatic monologue, in the manner of Robert Browning, but condensed into the fourteen lines of the sonnet. As a master of the sonnet, particularly, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the sound of the sea in a shell. Sea-Shell Murmurs by Eugene Lee-Hamilton The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood, On dusty shelves, when held against the ear, Proclaims its stormy parents; and we hear The faint far murmur of the breaking flood. We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood In our own veins, impetuous and near, And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear, And with our feeling’s every shifting mood. Lo, in my heart I hear, as in a shell, The murmur of a world beyond the grave, Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be. Thou fool; this echo is a cheat as well — The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave, A world unreal as the shell-heard sea. ___________________________________________ 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 will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
