Modern Love: II
Modern Love: II
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).
2Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
3By shutting all too zealous for their sin:
4Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask.
5But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had!
6He sickened as at breath of poison-flowers:
7A languid humour stole among the hours,
8And if their smiles encountered, he went mad,
9And raged deep inward, till the light was brown
10Before his vision, and the world, forgot,
11Looked wicked as some old dull murder-spot.
12A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown
13The pit of infamy: and then again
14He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
15To ape the magnanimity of love,
16And smote himself, a shuddering heap of pain.
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