Spiritual Quote of the Day (Eugene Lee-Hamilton, on the Archangel Michael)

 “From out the depths of crocus-coloured morn,
With rush of wings, the strong Archangel came,
And diamond spear; and leapt, as leaps a flame,
On Satan, where the light was scarcely born;
And rolled the sunless Rebel, bruised and torn,
Upon the earth’s bare plain, in dust and shame.”—English poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907), “On Raphael’s Archangel Michael,” in Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894)
 
I’m not making any extraordinary confession in writing that I had neither heard of Eugene Lee-Hamilton nor encountered his poetry until the other day. Considered a minor poet if interesting poet even in his own time, he was rapidly forgotten by the critical establishment after his death. I’d be hard-pressed to think of any anthology of Victorian poetry where he figures at all.
 
So, to satisfy your curiosity: I came across this poem in a review of his work by Edith Wharton, and published in 1996 in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. The notes to this latter volume indicate that Lee-Hamilton became an invalid as a result of his service in the British Embassy in Paris in the Franco-Prussian War.
 
While Wharton’s fame rests on her novels and short stories, her book reviews and other essays indicate that she was a perceptive reader of others, as in this comment on how the poet’s medical condition affected his emotional state and creative productivity:
 
“He suffered too much, and was too keenly sensitive to all the joy and beauty denied him, not to have his moods of dark relapse; but his verse proves that, as the years passed, he found increasing strength to bear his pain, and increasing consolation, in that very sensitiveness to imaginative reactions that had once been the cause of his intensest misery.”
 
(The image accompanying this post, Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan, was painted by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael in 1518.)