Modern Love is written by George Meredith. It is a
sequence of 50 poems, published in 1862. They are unconventional sonnets of 16 lines.
The sequence of poems,
mainly inspired by the failure of the first
marriage of the poet himself, traces the decline of passion between
husband and
wife, and the disintegration of a marriage, with the wife dying and the husband taking a mistress.
This is the age of the Victorian era undergoing a process of overhaul in society's accepted norms and systems. The narrative serves mainly as framework for a psychological study of romantic expectation followed by disillusionment.
Meredith's
poem, in a way, strikes a blow to the conventional sanctity of marriage as re-enacted in the failed marriage of Meredith himself. The couple did not settle for divorce, but rather, for a loveless union, which is an oblique way of putting up with society's constraints. The wife, at the end of the poem, provides an accepting space for truth and reality that she will never be happy again, in fact, an acceptance of a permanent loss of her life.
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