Modern Love (poetry collection)

Context

Modern Love reflects in part Meredith's own disillusionment after his wife Mary Ellen, the widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, left him for the painter Henry Wallis and had a child by him. The poem was not written until after her death in 1861, however, and cannot be regarded as autobiographical. Though it may depend emotionally on past feelings, details in the story-line differ in many respects from the biographical experience of both Meredith and his wife. In the poem the couple realise that their marriage is not working but jointly make a social pretence that suggests otherwise. Afterwards, and separately, they become sexually involved outside the marriage but eventually come together again. When this effort to repair the relationship fails, the wife poisons herself.

Meredith described his work to a correspondent as "a dissection of the sentimental passion of these days". It appeared in the context of other large-scale Victorian depictions of contemporary relationships, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) and Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House (1854/1862). In his 1891 bibliographical reprint of Meredith's poem, however, what seemed significant to Thomas Bird Mosher was that it had followed shortly after mediaevalising works like William Morris's The Defence of Guinevere (1858), Algernon Charles Swinburne's verse dramas The Queen-Mother and Rosamond (1860) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translations of The Early Italian Poets (1861). But Meredith seems to occupy a middle ground, for while his story of the failing marriage is set in the present day, his poetic form, his frequent archaisms, the ironical address with which he ends sonnet 30 – "Lady, this is my Sonnet to your eyes" – all call to mind the Elizabethan amatory sequence. And this, in the eyes of one female critic, is evidence of the masterly way in which Meredith matches form to content throughout the poem "by a recurrent opposition of sincerity to artifice".

In form, each 'sonnet' comprises four sets of internally rhyming quatrains, where the final quatrain either sums up the poem's drift or else serves as a turning point that takes the meaning in a new direction. In this way it corresponds roughly to the final couplet of the conventional Shakespearian sonnet. It was suggested to Meredith at the time that the form was modelled on the Italian caudate sonnet and, although he was dismissive of this attempt to find an orthodox ancestry for his work, the possibility continues to be discussed. Rather than continuity, the poet's theme is disruption within the marriage and this is further mirrored in disruption of the normal iambic pentameter within lines, especially by breaking up the narrative with frequent caesuras and enjambing the sense over lines.

Often ambiguous in any case, the meaning is made harder to follow because of the confusion over whether it is the voice of the narrator or the husband's inner dialogue we are hearing. A further level of ambiguity occurs in the different linguistic registers of wording, often in close proximity to each other, which make the author's intention unclear. In the third quatrain of sonnet 50, for example, the archaic word 'dole' in the line "Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole," is followed immediately by the alliterating colloquialism of "Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul": a prosaic response to the poetic. In similar fashion, the "tragic hints" thundering oceanically in the final stanza leave no more than a "faint thin line upon the shore".