KAREN ALKALAY-GUTmany English sonnets, where a concluding sestet sets out to resolve both
quatrains of the octave, Meredith's sixteen-line poem comprises four
quatrains, in which the final one may or may not reach a point of
resolution. Consequently, each of the expanded sonnets in "Modern Love"
has no commitment to drawing the episodes in this deeply unhappy
relationship to a neat conclusion.
Throughout Meredith's sonnet sequence, the underlying problem of
"modern love" lies in the impossibility of expressing delicate emotions in
an unfeeling post-Darwinian universe. Without an inherent connection to
the Creator, human beings resemble sophisticated beasts. Indeed, their
civilized behavior is merely a mask. In an extraordinary reversal of the
English sonnet's traditional subject matter, Sonnet 30 begins: "What are we
first? First animals" (1). The poem then traces the evolution of civilization,
from basic appetite to pragmatic action, before turning to the emergence of
ethical conduct. The poem comes to an abrupt close with an unexpected
apostrophe: "Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes" (16). This final line
reduces the entire age-old romantic plot of adulterous love to the level of
the jungle. If in tune with Darwin, Meredith's suggestion that men and
women are "First animals" nevertheless conflicts with Victorian beliefs in
the basic dignity of human life. But "Modern Love" neither celebrates lust
nor moralizes about it. Instead, it strives to give serious attention to a topic
that many of his contemporaries would dismiss as subject matter only fit
for titillating erotica. As a result, we find Meredith's aesthetic poetry
attempting to treat sensitive subject matter from an elegant and nonjudg-
mental distance.
But this is a masculine distance. Whenever Meredith, Rossetti, and
Swinburne made women the central topics of their poetry, femininity
remained the object of male scrutiny. It is not surprising, then, that the
situation for women poets at this time was very different, not least because
they were already at a distance, in many ways disenfranchised from the
aesthetic world. Christina Rossetti's poetry countered this sense of exclu-
sion in ingenious ways. In many of her early lyrics, she asserts a woman's
individual identity by refusing to conform to the conventional rituals of
courtship, engagement, and marriage. Although she shares with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne a strong interest in cold, deathly, and silent
femininity, she treats this figure from an opposing point of view. The first
stanza of her much-anthologized "Song" (1862) should be seen in this way:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:236