Modern Love: I
Modern Love: I
Original Text
George Meredith, Modern Love, and Poems of the English Roadside, with poems and ballads (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862). end M474 M63 1862 Fisher Rare Book Library (Toronto).
2That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
3The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
4Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
5And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
6Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
7Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
8With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
9Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
10Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
11Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet
12Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
13By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
14Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
15Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
16Each wishing for the sword that severs all.
Notes
1] This narrative sequence of fifty sixteen-line "sonnets" probably has its roots in the unhappy history of Meredith's unsuccessful marriage to his first wife, Mary Ellen Nicolls, Peacock's widowed daughter, who had been the inspiration for Love in the Valley. The great novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), tells the same story. Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1862
RPO poem Editors
H. Kerpneck
RPO Edition
3RP 3.293.
Rhyme