Abstract
Invented to celebrate an extra-marital passion, the lyric sequence has been used by modern poets to track the vicissitudes of a daily love within marriage. Three key dimensions that have been retained but transformed in this context are the poet-lover’s war with Time, the lyric’s cultivation of an “I-you” relation that is virtual rather than actual, and the contradictions involved in opening an intensely private relationship to public scrutiny.
Art and marriage: now a made match.
Eavan Boland, “In Which Hester Bateman … Takes an Irish Commission”
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Notes
- 1.
“Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes, / Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite— / Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write” (Astrophil and Stella 1, lines 12–14). Astrophil naïvely insists that he is not following in Petrarch’s footsteps, but as the sequence progresses it becomes apparent that this apple has not fallen far from the tree.
- 2.
As April Bernard (2014) reminds us, however, Browning’s sequence “ends pro forma with the dismissal of the lover as the speaker embraces death.” It is a courtship sequence, and hence more straightforwardly beholden to Petrarchan conventions than Meredith’s self-consciously “modern” sequence.
- 3.
Petrarchan (and anti-Petrarchan) sequences have also continued to be written. John Berryman’s mid-twentieth century sequence takes its bearings directly from Petrarch and Sidney (cf. Bernard 2014). Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose marriage sequence will be discussed in Chap. 7, is better known for Petrarchan sequences that celebrate an extra-marital passion. Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” is anti-Petrarchan but not a marriage sequence; Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons declares its allegiance to Shakespeare’s sonnets in its title and some of its constituent poems.
- 4.
Cf. David Baker (2007, 197): “Such is the dream of the lyric in particular, that the self shall be revealed and enlarged.”
- 5.
Of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath we are told, in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, that “she koude of that art [i.e the art of love] the olde daunce.” Having been married five times, she regards herself as an expert on marriage.
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Hedley, J. (2018). Introduction: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. In: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78157-0_1
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