Abstract
George Meredith used a lyric sequence to track the breakdown of a marriage along three key dimensions, each of which became crucial to the marriage sequence going forward: the shapes that time assumes within a marriage; the construction of identity through complex interactions between thought and speech, soliloquy, and conversation; and the involvement of third parties whose presence “triangulates” the marital dialogue. “Modern Love” was precedent-setting on all three dimensions: by taking a longer view of each in turn, this chapter establishes the self-conscious modernity of Meredith’s sequence.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Petrarch invented the modern lyric sequence” (Barolini 1989, 4). Robert Durling credits C. S. Lewis with having suggested this first in 1954, in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Roland Greene affirms that Petrarch’s way of building time into his sequence is what earns the Canzoniere (a.k.a. Rime sparse) “its accustomed … place at the historical and generic wellspring of the vernacular lyric sequence” (1991, 22).
- 2.
In England, the sonnet sequence flourished during the last decade of the sixteenth and first of the seventeenth century: Samuel Daniel, Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth all published sonnet sequences where the passage of time is both a theme and a structural principle.
- 3.
Cf. Greene (1991), who cites Petrarch’s “obsession with temporality as a cultural and epistemological problem” (22) and lists particular ideas about time “that Petrarch is often said to have communicated to Western culture,” both in his lyrics and in his narratives and letters (46).
- 4.
Stuart Curran (1986, chap. 3) credits Charlotte Turner Smith with initiating a “second renaissance” of the amatory sonnet sequence; her Elegiac Sonnets of 1784 created a popular vogue for the “sonnet of sensibility.” But Golden (1974) argues that the love sonnet sequence as such did not come back into vogue until the publication of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850.
- 5.
Meredith does not personify [T]ime very often; more often he capitalizes and/or personifies the Past and the Future, as in poems 11 and 12, which will be discussed further on.
- 6.
Dorothy Mermin also stresses that “Modern Love” is “an oddity among Victorian poems” in that it is “in a very real sense novelistic.” For Mermin, the hallmarks of this are “psychological realism, the awareness of social context, and above all the temporal development of personal relationships” (1976, 100).
- 7.
Helen Vendler (2013), in her review of Mitchell and Benford’s 2012 edition of “Modern Love,” gives a trenchant account of how Meredith’s sonnets are very often structured.
- 8.
Shakespeare aspires toward a comparable stance vis-à-vis the “master mistress” whose beauty he worships, categorically distinguishing that love from the carnal lust both he and the young man harbor toward the same woman.
- 9.
Meredith is hearkening back to Thomas Wyatt’s free translation of one of Petrarch’s poems; in Wyatt’s poem “Love,” whom the poem’s speaker calls “my Master,” has been banished to “to the heart’s forest” by his lady’s displeasure.
- 10.
I will be returning to this idea in Chap. 3, under the rubric of “aeviternity.”
- 11.
John Holmes (2010, 529) explains that “For Meredith, as for Darwin, Nature has no long-term objectives, no grand plan. It is simply the processes of birth, growth, and death, which together create the persistent ‘harmonies’ of the natural world. A corollary of this is that in Nature, everything is transitory except Nature herself.”
- 12.
Mitchell and Benford’s footnote to poem 30 references this sonnet, along with Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” which puts forward a more “realistic” view of love. The romantic idealism of Shakespeare’s “war with Time” is mostly reserved for the “master mistress” of sonnets 1–129.
- 13.
Bakhtin notoriously argued that poetry is “monologic”—incapable, that is, of the “heteroglossia” that is the “dialogic” novel’s forte. But since The Dialogic Imagination was published in English in 1981, a number of critics have pointed out that poems as well as novels can and sometimes do foreground heteroglossia. See esp. David H. Richter (1990), “Dialogism and Poetry.”
- 14.
Adela Pinch (2010, 121) thinks that the poem begins with the husband watching his wife “unblushingly receive her lover’s kiss on the forehead.” In context, either reading is possible: in poem 3, the husband desires to “put a kiss” on her “cool brow” but fears to “meet him there.”
- 15.
In American law, there is a “zone of privacy” that protects the relationship from intrusion by the state; spouses are not obliged to testify against their spouse in a court of law, and a “communications privilege” attaches to their conversations. The UK and many other countries share with the US a long tradition of respect for the privacy of the marriage relationship, especially of the partners’ sexual activities. What they choose to do to and for their children is subject to stronger public scrutiny, and the zone of privacy is not allowed to become a zone of immunity against trial and punishment for certain kinds of crimes, including domestic violence.
- 16.
That a marriage be witnessed is a requirement in all states of the United States. It’s traditional to have the best man and the maid of honor sign the marriage certificate as its witnesses of record.
- 17.
In the United States, until recently, both annulment and divorce required a showing that one of the partners had failed to honor their public vows in some key way. “No fault” divorce became available state by state between 1970 and 1985.
- 18.
Meredith was accused by a reviewer for the Spectator, in 1862, of having brought to his subject “a freedom that mistakes itself for courage, and is simply bad and prurient taste” (Meredith 1862/2012, 183). Other reviewers were offended by the immorality, as they saw it, of Meredith’s whole attitude toward marriage. “So far from a condition of doubt and uncertainty on the general tone of matrimonial morality being in any sense an interesting or attractive thing,” asserts an unsigned diatribe in the Saturday Review, “it is one of the most disastrous calamities that can befall a nation” (ibid., 204).
- 19.
In the Renaissance epithalamium, it should be noted, the wedding night is a quasi-public occasion; according to Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) these poems were written to be sung epi-thalamos, “at the bridal chamber,” while the married couple was inside consummating the marriage.
- 20.
Cf. poem 22, lines 15–16, where he apostrophizes “You burly lovers on the village green” to insist that “Yours is a lower, but a happier star!”
- 21.
Cf. Dorothy Mermin (1976, 113): “We are always aware, because the husband so acutely is, that his feelings exist and have meaning only in the ordinary world he inhabits with other people.” Mermin’s point is well taken, but the husband’s feelings and beliefs have also been underwritten by the literary, fictive worlds of the romance tradition and the amatory sonnet sequence.
- 22.
“… in the weak ribs by a fatal shaft / Struck through” is how the husband facetiously characterizes this young man, who has evidently fallen prey to a no longer viable yet by no means discredited set of clichés about love. See also note 25 below.
- 23.
Hagstrum’s epilogue includes a brief discussion of John Donne’s love poetry and Milton’s Adam and Eve.
- 24.
Thus in Christian art and literature, Hagstrum suggests (1992, 52), triangulation is a function of “religious norms and commitments that have governed and organized the practice of love, even in the bedroom”; in Freud’s account of amorous desire, “the mother is almost inevitably present between the lovers.”
- 25.
René Girard has argued, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) that the love relation is always a triangle in the special sense that desire is always “imitative”: “the subject learns what to desire by imitating the desire of another person.” This “other” is a rival, but may also be someone he idolizes: “The subject knows what to do, how to act, what to desire, because he can copy his idol.” This is Dorothy Hale’s paraphrase of Girard’s theory (2006, 287). The naïve young friend in poem 21 is a textbook case of what Girard calls “external mediation.”
- 26.
Ganymede was the beautiful boy that Jove abducted to be his cupbearer—suggesting that the marital union “he” assists Orlando and Rosalind to prepare for has a complex lineage that includes same-sex as well as heterosexual couples, pagan philosophical and mythic texts as well as Christian “norms and commitments.”
- 27.
“No passion is conceivable or in fact declared in a world where everything is permitted. For passion always presupposes, between subject and object, a third party constituting an obstacle to their embrace—a King Mark separating Tristan from Iseult—the obstacle being social (moral, conventional, even political) to such a degree that we even find it identified, at its limit, with society itself …” argues Denis de Rougemont (1963, 42). Cf. Anne Carson, who argues that eros “exists because certain boundaries do” (1986, 30).
- 28.
Recent commentary on Shakespeare’s sequence has opened up the possibility that the poet does envision and obtain a sexual relationship with the young man. But according to sonnet 20, sexual intimacy is not on the table: Nature, alas, says the poet, changed her mind at the last minute and made him a man instead of a woman. Since, therefore, “she prick’d thee out [i.e. decked thee out/gave thee a “prick”] for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure” (20, lines 13–14). It is “Nature,” in this instance, who does the work of triangulation; behind her lies the injunction to procreate in the Book of Genesis, which is repeatedly invoked in the sonnets that open Shakespeare’s sequence.
- 29.
Astrophil and Stella is, however, something of an exception in this context; its first-person protagonist, whom we know to be Sidney, is ironically self-distanced (as the sequence’s title implies).
- 30.
James Galvin’s and Stephen Dunn’s divorce sequences come to mind. In Galvin’s X (2003) the only perspective available to us is a first-person sense of outrage: she wasn’t supposed to leave him for someone else! In Dunn’s The Insistence of Beauty (2004), the only perspective on offer is a husband’s angry truculence in the face of his wife’s sense of betrayal. Why should we empathize with either of these attitudes? We won’t, but we might compassionate them if they were self-distanced, or if a third-person witness were present.
- 31.
Here again, Girard’s theory of desire is relevant.
- 32.
“In tragic hints here see what evermore / Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean’s force” (“Modern Love” 50, lines 13–14).
References
Abrams, M.H. 2009. A glossary of literary terms. 9th ed. Co-ed. Geoffrey Galt Harpham. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage. (Orig. pub. 1957.)
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006.
Barolini, Teodolinda. 1989. The making of a lyric sequence: Time and narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Modern Language Notes 104 (1): 1–38.
Bernstein, Carol. 1979. Precarious enchantment: A reading of Meredith’s poetry. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.
Carson, Anne. 1986. Eros the bittersweet. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1988. Two cheers for romance. In Passionate attachments, ed. Willard Gaylin and Ethel Person, 85–100. New York: The Free Press.
Comstock, Cathy. 1987. ‘Speak, and I see the side-lie of a truth’: The problematics of truth in Meredith’s ‘Modern Love’. Victorian Poetry 25 (2): 129–141.
Culler, Jonathan. 1981. The pursuit of signs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Curran, Stuart. 1986. Poetic form and British Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
De Rougemont, Denis. 1963. Love declared: Essays on the myths of love. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon.
Dunn, Stephen. 2004. The insistence of beauty: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton.
Durling, Robert. 1976. Introduction. In Petrarch’s lyric poems, 1–34. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Galvin, James. 2003. X. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.
Golden, Arline. 1973. ‘The game of sentiment’: Tradition and innovation in Meredith’s ‘Modern Love’. ELH 40 (2): 264–284.
———. 1974. Victorian renascence: The revival of the amatory sonnet sequence, 1850–1900. Genre 7: 133–147.
Greene, Roland. 1991. Post-Petrarchism: Origins and innovations of the Western lyric sequence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hagstrum, Jean H. 1992. Esteem enlivened by desire: The couple from Homer to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hale, Dorthy, ed. 2006. Psychoanalytic approaches: Introduction. In The novel: An anthology of criticism and theory 1900–2000, 272–293. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hecht, Anthony. 1967. The Dover bitch. In The hard hours, 17. New York: Atheneum.
Holmes, John. 2010. Darwinism, feminism, and the sonnet sequence: Meredith’s ‘Modern Love’. Victorian Literature 48 (4): 523–538.
Hughes, Linda. 2010. The Cambridge introduction to Victorian poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jagodzinski, Cecile M. 1999. Privacy and print: Reading and writing in seventeenth-century England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Meredith, George. 1862/2012. Modern Love and poems of the English roadside, with poems and ballads. Ed. Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Ann Benford. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mermin, Dorothy. 1976. Poetry as fiction: Meredith’s ‘Modern Love’. ELH 43 (1): 100–119.
Milton, John. 1644. The doctrine and discipline of divorce. In The Milton reading room, ed. Thomas Luxon et al., 2nd ed. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton.
———. 1667, 1674. Paradise Lost. The Milton reading room. Ed. Thomas Luxon et al. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton.
Pinch, Adela. 2008. Love thinking. Victorian Studies 50 (3): 379–397.
———. 2010. Thinking about other people in nineteenth-century British writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Puttenham, George. 1589. The maner of reioysings at mariages and weddings. In The arte of English poesie, Book I, Chap. XXVI. Project Gutenberg, 2005. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16420/pg16420-images.html.
Reader, Willie D. 1972. The autobiographical author as fictional character: Point of view in Meredith’s ‘Modern Love’. Victorian Poetry 10 (2): 131–143.
Richter, David H. 1990. Dialogism and poetry. Studies in the Literary Imagination 23 (1): 9–27.
Selinger, Eric Murphy. 1998. What is it then between us? Traditions of love in American poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Sidney, Sir Philip. 1591. Astrophil and Stella. In The poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler Jr., 163–237. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/stella.html.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 2014. Privacy: Concealing the eighteenth-century self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tanner, Tony. 1979. Adultery in the novel: Contract and transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tucker, Cynthia Grant. 1972. Meredith’s broken laurel: ‘Modern Love’ and the Renaissance sonnet tradition. Victorian Poetry 10 (4): 351–365.
Vendler, Helen. 2002. Poems, poets, poetry: An introduction and anthology. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. (3rd ed. 2009.).
———. 2013. Tragedy in the bedroom. New Republic 29: 39–45.
Wordsworth, William. 1807 [1815]. Ode. [Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood.] In Poems in two volumes, vol. 2. Duke University Libraries: British Romantic Literature. https://archive.org/details/poemsintwovolume00word.
Zak, Gur. 2010. Petrarch’s humanism and the care of the self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hedley, J. (2018). Resources and Lineage: Meredith’s “Modern Love”. In: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78157-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78157-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78156-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78157-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)