Victorian Poetry

Aesthetic and Decadent poetry

Swinburne's ritualistic poetics. Yet it was left to George Meredith - who for
a short time in 1862 lodged with both Rossetti and Swinburne - to explore
these preoccupations in a palpably real world. In the impressive sonnet
sequence "Modern Love" (1862), Meredith moves from the usual medieval
settings or the sensational location of the fallen woman's rooms to deal
with an everyday husband and wife. Because intimate relationships were to
some extent replacing religion and social achievement as the source of
happiness in literature at this time, one might reasonably expect from the
title of this ambitious work that the topic would be the triumph of romantic
success between men and women. But Meredith's poem recounts the story
of a marriage that disintegrates, through no great fault of either the
character or the class of the participants. Further, the sequence examines
this fraught relationship from the protagonists' different points of view,
implying that there is no objective standard against which the reader can
judge this distinctly "modern" type of love. The opening sonnet presents
the narrator's perspective, one that often feels very close to the husband's
despairing outlook on his marriage:

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

That, at this hand's light quiver by her head,

The strange low sobs that shook their common bed

Were called into her with a sharp surprise,

And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,

Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay

Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away

With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes

Her giant heart of Memory and Tears

Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat

Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet

Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,

By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.

Like sculptured effigies they might be seen

Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;

Each wishing for the sword that severs all. (GM 1-16)

From this first sensational episode, which takes place in the marriage bed
when the husband recognizes in his wife's tears the failure of their union,
until her suicide at the end of the sequence, the profound tension of love in
the modern world - its arduous complexity, and the urgency of its success -
is ruthlessly explored. The poetic means to analyze this "marriage-tomb" is
an expanded sixteen-line sonnet: the additional two lines in themselves
indicate that the conventional sonnet form has proved insufficient to
represent "modern love." Unlike the traditional Petrarchan structure of

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