Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Houston, Natalie M

What disturbed many original reviewers of Modern Love was the subject matter of the poem: the marriage is clearly in decline; the husband, convinced that his wife is having an affair, seeks solace in another woman; the husband and wife unsuccessfully attempt a sexual reconciliation; after the husband encounters the wife with her lover, they reveal their respective liaisons to each other, and the sequence ends with the wife's suicide. In its often bitter and brutal examination of the end of love, Meredith's poem challenged the assumptions of its original readers. Recent critics have been more accepting of the subject matter of the poem, but have generally sought to anchor it in Meredith's own personal experience (his wife left him for another man, and Meredith composed the poem shortly after her death in 1861). The "story" of Modern Love is deliberately murky, and many modern editions publish prose summaries of the sonnets to assist the reader in following the narrative. It does Meredith's work a disservice, however, to call it "a kind of novel in verse" (as do several anthologies), which obscures the complex ways in which his sequence negotiates between the sonnet tradition and the novel.

Meredith always called the fifty poems that make up the Modern Love series "sonnets," although they bear little resemblance to any of the sonnet forms legitimated by Victorian critics. Consisting of sixteen lines rhymed in four abba quatrains, the Modern Love sonnets at least visually acknowledge both Tennyson's In Memoriam and the Petrarchan sonnet tradition. Yet the syntax and sense of the poems belie the filiation of the rhyme scheme, as Meredith revises the amatory sonnet tradition, expanding the scope of lyric toward narrative. By eschewing a first-person pronoun, Meredith makes clear in the first sonnet that he is creating a new form entirely:

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.