Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

That, at his hands light quiver by her head,

The strange low sobs that shook their common bed,

Were called into her with a sharp surprise,

And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,

Dreadfully venomous to him.... (1.1-6)

John Westland Marston, reviewing the poem in 1862, says, "These sonnets resemble scattered leaves from the diary of a stranger. The allusions, the comments, the interjections, all refer to certain particulars which are not directly related, and have to be painfully deduced" (100). What makes the speaker of this sequence a "stranger" is not simply that the story is unclear, but that Meredith clearly separates himself from the character in the poem by opening the sequence with the introduction of two characters referred to in the third person. Marston's remarks reveal the documentary assumption about the sonnet form (the leaves of a diary) but also the challenge Meredith's sequence posed to it. The amatory sonnet sequence tradition, based though it might be on extended literary conceits, nevertheless required the impression of a coherent speaking subject; here Meredith resolutely refuses such coherence.

One of Meredith's characteristic techniques in Modern Love is to shift within a single sonnet from a third-person perspective to the first-person pronoun:

... Once: "Have you no fear?"

He said: Iwas dusk; she in his grasp; none near.

She laughed: "No, surely; am I not with you?"

And uttering that soft starry "you," she leaned

Her gentle body near him, looking up;

And from her eyes, as from a poison-cup,

He drank until the flittering eyelids screened.

Devilish malignant witch! and oh, young beam

Of heaven's circle-glory! Here thy shape

To squeeze like an intoxicating grape

I might, and yet thou goest safe, supreme. (IX.6-16)

These shifts from third- to first-person perspective, when the lyric form breaks through the narrative, mark moments of emotional intensity. By deliberately exposing the boundaries between intense lyric emotion and distanced narrative, Meredith deconstructs Victorian notions of lyric and biographical authenticity in the sonnet, while pursuing the kind of psychological investigation into character usually reserved for a novel or dramatic monologue.

Many critics have been concerned with mapping the relation between the narrating third-person perspective and the husband's first-person perspective.3 Although a majority of the sonnets are written from the first-person point of view of the husband, the first and final two sonnets are entirely from a third-person perspective, forming a kind of narrative frame. The third-person perspective, whether in the framing sonnets or in some of the mixed narration poems, offers commentary on the husband's feelings and actions. The chronology of key events forms the sequence's narrative structure: the husband confronts his wife in XV, seeks a new love in XXVII, and attempts to reconcile with his wife in XLII. Repetition of key phrases connects XXVII-XXVIII and XXXI-XXXII, and clusters of images provide other connective threads in the series (Golden, "Game" 271-274; Mermin, "Poetry as Fiction" 104-112). But it is clear that the narrative effect is much stronger in Modern Love than in Sonnets from the Portuguese precisely because the voice is less stable. The shifts between event and reflection help to organize the emotional material in ways familiar to readers of novels.