Ying is on Facebook
And likes Twitter
E-mail YingHello friends! This week, I’m writing a series of short essays for my Traitor in the Tunnel blog tour, which starts at the end of this month. The tour will feature some of my favourite YA bloggers, including the Story Siren, I Swim for Oceans, the Booksmugglers, Reading in Color, Steph Su Reads, and the Bookmonsters. Hurray!
My theme for this blog tour is Victorian Obsessions and some of my research for it led me to a series of poems I haven’t thought about since I was a PhD student: Modern Love, by George Meredith. Modern Love is actually a sonnet sequence – a chain of fifty connected poems, each with the same rhyme scheme and all on the same subject.
That’s already ambitious. Yet Meredith goes further. Most sonnet sequences are about love – the development of a romance, the triumph of true love, pure and passionate. But Meredith turns this around completely, because Modern Love is about the breakdown of a marriage; his own marriage. Here’s the first 16-line sonnet, “By this he knew she wept with waking eyes”:
- By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
- That, at his hand’s 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 gasping snakes,
- Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
- Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
- With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
- Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
- Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
- Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet
- Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
- By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
- Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
- Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
- Each wishing for the sword that severs all.
This sonnet blows me away every time I read it. It’s ruthless and violent, fiercely radical and brutally effective. I’d never guess that it was written in 1862; to me, it sounds more like 1962. And it’s a great reminder – especially to me, since I’m now writing about “the Victorians” and invariably generalizing a bit – that every era has its startling exceptions.
What do you think of the poem? Are there other exceptions (Victorian or otherwise) that it calls to mind?
As well as a blog tour, I’ll be having a launch party in Kingston to celebrate the publication of Traitor. Hurrah! The details:
Saturday, March 3, 2012, from 3 to 5 pm
Novel Idea Books, 156 Princess St, Kingston
If you’re local, I’d love to see you there!
Tags: blog tour, launch party!, musings, poetry, The Traitor and the Tunnel, Victoriana
I love poetry, and this sonnet is particularly beautiful! Thanks for sharing it. I find poetry sometimes has more impact on the human understanding then prose does. Who is your favourite poet?
Hopefully I might possibly be able to attend the launch party- I would LOVE to meet you! But I live a few hours away from Kingston and it’s an especially tough trek in the winter
Ack – so sorry for the slow reply, JaneE! I’m really glad you enjoyed the sonnet, and completely agree about poetry’s special ability to say much in a compressed way. It’s like an arrow to the brain (in the best possible way). I don’t have a single favourite poet, but in the nineteenth century I love Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, some Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti. Do you have favourite poets? (And I completely understand about driving in winter!)
I love that sonnet! So mysterious. We are writing Poems in Language right now. S ofar I have written two cinquain, a diamante, a found poem, rhyme and acrostic poem. We are doing sonnet next week.
What a truly perfect way of describing poetry!
I have so many favourite poets, although if I had to choose one I would say Emily Dickinson in a heartbeat. Though I do like Byron, the poetry of the Bronte sisters, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow…there are so many!
I can’t believe I forgot about Emily Brontë, JaneE! And my grandfather is a big Longfellow fan.