Modern Love: XXII
Modern Love: XXII
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).
2There is about her mouth a nervous twitch.
3'Tis something to be told, or hidden:--which?
4I get a glimpse of hell in this mild guess.
5She has desires of touch, as if to feel
6That all the household things are things she knew.
7She stops before the glass. What sight in view?
8A face that seems the latest to reveal!
9For she turns from it hastily, and tossed
10Irresolute, steals shadow-like to where
11I stand; and wavering pale before me there,
12Her tears fall still as oak-leaves after frost.
13She will not speak. I will not ask. We are
14League-sundered by the silent gulf between.
15Yon burly lovers on the village green,
16Yours is a lower, and a happier star!
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 3.294.
Rhyme