Vernon Lee and Eugene Lee-Hamilton

Abstract

Both Eugene Lee-Hamilton and his half-sister Vernon Lee were drawn to images of disinterment and discovery. In one of his earlier sonnets ‘Sunken Gold’, Lee-Hamilton pictures submerged treasure — ‘In dim green depths rot ingot-laden ships’ — a treasure which he compares, as he frequently does, with his own gifts and hopes wasted by the illness which afflicted him from 1873 to 1893 when he began his recovery:

So lie the wasted gifts, the long-lost hopes,

Beneath the now hushed surface of myself,

In lonelier depths than where the diver gropes.

They lie deep, deep; but I at times behold

In doubtful glimpses, on some reefy shelf,

The gleam of irrecoverable gold.

(Lee-Hamilton 1884, 131; 2002, 123)¹