It was nice to read ‘Modern Love’ in an edition from 1892 that was inscribed as a gift to someone from February of that same year, and with a dried flower between two of its pages, imagining the day over a hundred years ago when it was placed there.

The 50 sonnet poem speaks of an unfortunate universal truth: marriage going stale with time. Placed in Victorian England with the societal restrictions at the time, the result is not hostility or divorce, but something far worse: indifference. As the narrator sarcastically laments, “O, look we like a pair who for fresh nuptials joyfully yield all else?”

Both silently wear a mask, “wishing for the sword that severs all”, and meanwhile having affairs. To guests, they play the “Hiding the Skeleton” game, and in the course of the evening those visitors will see “Love’s corpse-light shine”. The unhappiness both feel is not spoken of directly until the end, and even then, it can’t save them from remaining chained to one another.

The poem is made more poignant in learning that Meredith’s wife had run off with another man four years before he wrote it in 1862, leaving him heartbroken and disillusioned. What shocked society when it was published was less that he drew directly from his own marital experiences, but that he could admit what many felt, that some are bound in passionless marriages, that it’s difficult to remain in love in ‘modern’ times, and that it’s tragic that people feel forced to continue on with one another when they’re both miserable.

The feelings certainly come across, but it’s a little hard to follow the meaning of the Victorian poetry at times, with word patterns a bit forced to complete its rhymes. The result is that it doesn’t stand up quite as well as others do with age, but it’s relatively short and worth reading. ( )