Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads
Page 37
7–10: Berg reads:
The timid breeze pants blue and chill
Athwart the lake:
One crow flaps from the western hill;
And in its wake,
11: Berg reads “A windy line”
12: Berg reads “In the wind’s pauses sing the brooks Lend my [illegible] come, the home of the [illegible].” OaW reads “A purple bow the shadowless river looks.”
13–18: Berg omits this stanza
22–24: Berg reads:
But coming night
Blacken’d all with its hoard of storm:
The birds are shelter’d close and warm
Nestle to me, my love, and keep thee warm.
UNKNOWN FAIR FACES
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
5: EdL reads “in the Heaven of me”
14: EdL ends without punctuation
PHANTASY
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
IV.2: OaW line ends with colon
VI.1: EdL spelled “Beguine” as “Benguine”; corrected in EdL 1911 errata to “Béguine”
VIII.1: EdL reads “ballet-beauty, who perked”
VIII.4: OaW misspelled as “ancles”
IX.1: EdL reads “twirled, the”
XII.3: OaW line ends with exclamation mark
XIII.3: OaW line reads “King Skull, in the black confessionals,”
XXIII.1: OaW lines ends with semicolon
XXVI.2: EdL reads “powers that Nature gave”
XXVII.3 EdL line ends with comma
XXXI.4: OaW omits tilde on Sevilla
SHEMSELNIHAR
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
(manuscripts in Berg and NB B)
EdL omits stanza numbers
I.1: EdL reads “O my lover!”
I.3: EdL reads “How I shuddered—I”
IV.4: EdL reads “The life that here”
VI.2: EdL reads “think it my voice!”
VII.3: EdL reads “of freedom and gorgeousness,”
VII.4: EdL reads “Bespangle my slavery,”
Berg manuscript transcribed here includes ten stanzas, seven of which appear (in revised form) in the published poem:
Let us die, O my lover, in this long kiss:
Let us die locked/stretch’d together close close in the night:
Let me die and be dust when they break our bliss;
When they cut thee away from my breast and my sight.
Let me die and be dust as the pale lilies are,
For thou are the life blood of Shemselnihar.
O love, O my lover, thy love like a wave
Overwhelm’d me, it drown’d me in one deep desire:
I shudder’d; I knew not that I was a slave
Till I look’d on thy face: how the world spun with fire!
I look’d and remember’d what anguish would mar
The first and sole passion of Shemselnihar.
And he came, whose I am: O my lover! he came.
And his slave still so envied of women was I:
And I turn’d as a wither’d leaf turns from the flame,
And I shrunk into Death in his arms, dark and dry.
Take me close! clasp me now! hide me quite! may no bar
Burn again twixt thy bosom and Shemselnihar.
Yet with thee, like a hot throbbing rose, how I bloom!
Like a rose by the fountain whose showering we hear,
As we lie, O my lover, in this rich gloom,
And smell the faint breath of the lemon groves near.
As we lie gazing out on that glowing great star
Which shows thee so darkly to Shemselnihar.
Yet with thee, am I not as a strong climbing vine,
Firm to bind, free to cherish: deliciously sweet?
Death alone, O my lover! shall e’er disentwine
The life that reels over thee, neck, waist, and feet.
No! never again shall that jewel’d head jar
With the music thou breathest on Shemselnihar.
Yet with thee, am I not as a fast sailing ship
That dares the wild tempest—that trusts the strange sea?
Hanging thus over thee, full on thy lip:
Hoping and trusting/living in nothing but thee:
My over! in thee! and if wreckt shall each spar
Show thee how truthful was Shemselnihar.
Away, far away, where the wandering scents
Of all flowers are sweetest, white mountains among,
My kindred abide in their green and blue tents:
Bear me to them, my lover! they lost me so young.
Slip, slip down the stream and mount steed till afar,
None question thy claim upon Shemselnihar.
Away, far away from this radiance that swoons
Sick in my vision without thee! away
Far, from o my lover the splendor of these hush’d saloons,
Far! ——How the bulbul slips from the dark/black spray
Scattering to joy bliss his long wail with a bar
Of sweetness like thine over Shemselnihar. . . .
He pants pants with love: only love, only love,
Only love, O my lover! yearns up in his voice.
The night like a great flower bends from Above,
Odorous, breathing in sighs that are joys:
Joys even as ours where/tho’ the/his keen scimitar
So jealously watches/hovers o’er Shemselnihar.
Would that, less generous, he would oppress,
Bind me, upbraid me, give brand deep ground for hate,
Than with this tyrannous gorgeousness
Dress/spangle up my slavery, mock my strange fate:
Would, O my lover! He [illegible] knew to debar
Thy coming, and earn hate curse of Shemselnihar.
NB B, p. 22 includes the following lines:
Let me die, O my lover! in this long kiss
Of love we can never know:
Shemselnihar
Let me die, O my lover! in this long kiss.
Let us die stretched together close close in the night.
Let us die & be dust when they break my our bliss,
And cut thee away from my breast & my sight.
Let us die & be dust as the pale flowers are,
For thou art the life-blood of Shemselnihar.
[A ROAR THRO’ THE TALL TWIN ELM-TREES]
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
(manuscript in Beinecke, Notebook B, p. 45)
1: NB B reads “A roar in the double elm-trees”
2: NB B reads “The burst of the storm”
3: NB B reads “The cassia & the willow”; EdL reads “The South-wind seized the willow”
4: NB B reads “By strenuous gusts were sway’d.”
5–8: NB B reads:
The anger wasting of the tempest
Swept chords of shrouded woes
Awoke me to my woes:
And all night long at my window
Knock’d the winter rose.
9: line in NB B ends with period instead of exclamation point
10: 1862 reads “outcast of must pine”; GM revised “of” to “it” in BEIN MSS 7, BEIN 862.1, BEIN 862.6; 1911 EdL errata reflects revision as well; editors corrected here
11: NB B reads “And outcast from thy bosom,”
12: NB B reads “Am I, O lady mine!”
[WHEN I WOULD IMAGE HER FEATURES]
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
9: EdL line ends with comma
10: EdL reads “domes, and towers” with no comma at line end
[I CHAFE AT DARKNESS]
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
1: EdL line ends with comma
3: EdL reads
“eyes; the”
18: EdL reads “Waving seem.”
BY THE ROSANNA
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
20: EdL ends at line 20
44: OaW inserts the following stanzas between line 44 and line 45:
And yonder a little boy bellows the Topic:
The picture of yesterday clean for a penny:
Done with a pen so microscopic
That we all see ourselves in the face of the many.
Business, Business, seems the word,
In this unvarying On-on-on!
The volume coming, the volume gone,
Shoots, glancing at Beauty, undeterr’d:
As in the torrent of cabs we both
Have glanced, borne forward, willing or loth.
113: OaW reads “Inspiration” with the first letter capitalized
118: OaW reads “world” with no capitalization
122: OaW reads “three-fold”
140: OaW reads “Man” with the first letter capitalized
151: OaW reads “Come from thy keen Alps down, and, hoarse”
164: OaW reads “Have I frighted it, frail thing, aghast?”
174: OaW line ends with dash
ODE TO THE SPIRIT OF EARTH IN AUTUMN
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862”
(manuscript of a fragment appears in Beinecke, Notebook B, p. 49)
6: EdL line ends with colon
7: EdL reads “cherub-mouths”
10: EdL reads “dumb: then,”
15: EdL reads “thronging figures failed.”
21: EdL reads “glorious South-west.”
24: EdL reads “wings; then sharp the”
30: EdL reads “some on torn”
53: EdL reads “the air and rise,”
62: EdL reads “Here stood”
70: EdL reads “upon their wide roots”
73: EdL reads “Of mournfulness, not”
74: EdL reads “For melancholy, but Joy’s excess,”
91: 1862 and EdL read “than her who bore”; GM revised “her” to “she” in BEIN MSS 7 and BEIN 862.6; editors corrected here per Meredith’s corrections
116: EdL reads “In the circles”
134: 1862 reads “Of my life through thro’ the”; editors deleted “through”
137: EdL uses semicolon at end of line; GM revised comma to period in BEIN MSS 7
141: EdL reads “Great Mother Nature!”
142: EdL reads “the season and shun”
170: EdL line ends with comma
175–219: EdL omits these lines
226: EdL reads “when our season”
245: EdL line ends with colon
NB B (p. 49) includes a fragment, lines of which were precursors to “Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn.” The following transcription of the fragment can be compared to lines 235–53 of the published version:
Prophetic of the years to be;
Her dirge swells to a jubilee.
Like the wild western war-chief sinking
Down to the death he views unblinking,—
Her dirge becomes swells to a jubilee!
He for his happy hunting fields
Forgets the muttered chaunt, and yields
His ebbing life to exultation:—
In the proud anticipation
Shouting the glories of his nation;
Shouting the grandeur of his race
Shouting the grandeur of his race;
Shouting his own great deeds of daring:—
And when at last death sets grasps his face,
And on the grass he lies in peace,
With all his painted terrors staring,-
His tribes know well he leaves he has left the place,
And To [paper torn] father’s in the chase.
THE DOE: A FRAGMENT (FROM “WANDERING WILLIE”)
Included in EdL XXXI (Poems III), under “Poems from ‘Modern Love’: 1862” (manuscript of extended poem in Beinecke, Notebook A; see PB’s discussion of the full poem for composition history)
15: EdL reads “pointing South,”
16: EdL reads “daintiest, fleetest-footed”
18: EdL reads “Beyond: her”
25: EdL reads “As now across”
26: EdL reads “And now beneath”
37: EdL reads “Here winding”
39: EdL reads “water here like”
41: EdL reads “And—‘Let her go;”
43: EdL reads “sighed: his eyes”
44: EdL reads “Brimming: ‘’Tis my”
48: EdL reads “The white gleams” and omits stanza break after line 48
50: EdL reads “pillows propped,”
53: EdL reads “A se’nnight—to my”
55: EdL line ends with colon
63: EdL reads “fondly: and I”
64: EdL line ends with colon
65: EdL reads “nurse nor I”
93: EdL reads “unheard; the young”
136: EdL line ends with period
141: EdL reads “Shut in a”
163: EdL omits line break between 162 and 163; EdL reads “Colourless, her long”
164: EdL reads “a tempest tossed”
167: EdL reads “drooping toward the”
169: EdL reads “And heaved from sea with”
177: EdL reads “her wild hair let brush”
181: EdL reads “sighs they sank;”
191: EdL line ends with no punctuation
193: EdL reads “With subtler sweet beneficence”
Suggestions for Further Reading
EDITIONS OF MEREDITH’S POETRY
Meredith, George. The Poems of George Meredith. 2 vols. Ed. Phyllis Bartlett. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
. The Works of George Meredith. 29 vols. Ed. William Maxse Meredith. London: Constable, 1898–1911.
BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS
Ellis, S. M. George Meredith: His Life and Friends in Relation to his Work. London: Grant Richards, 1919.
Johnson, Diane. The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives. New York: Knopf, 1972.
Meredith, George. The Letters of George Meredith. 3 vols. Ed. C. L. Cline. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970.
Sencourt, Robert E. The Life of George Meredith. New York: Scribner, 1929.
Stevenson, Lionel. The Ordeal of George Meredith: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1953.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collie, Michael. George Meredith: A Bibliography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.
Esdaile, Arundell. Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of George Meredith. London: W. T. Spencer, 1907.
Forman, Maurice Buxton. A Bibliography of the Writing in Prose and Verse of George Meredith. Edinburgh: Bibliographical Society, 1922.
Williams, Ioan. Meredith: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.
CRITICISM AND SCHOLARSHIP
Books
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.
Bernstein, Carol L. Precarious Enchantment: A Reading of Meredith’s Poetry. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1979.
Blair, Kirstie. Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Fletcher, Ian. Meredith Now. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, 1971.
Forman, M. B. George Meredith: Some Early Appreciations. London: Chapman & Hall, 1909.
Galland, René. George Meredith and British Criticism (1851–1902). Paris: Les Presses Françaises, 1923.
Kelvin, Norman. A Troubled Eden: Nature and Society in the Works of George Meredith. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961.
McSweeney, Kerry. Supreme Attachments: Studies in Victorian Love Poetry. London: Ashgate, 1998.
Phelan, Joseph. The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Pinch,
Adela. Thinking about other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Trevelyan, George Macaulay. The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith. London: T. and A. Constable, 1906.
Van Remoortel, Marianne. Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895: Genre, Gender, and Criticism. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011.
Wright, Walter F. Art and Substance in George Meredith: A Study in Narrative. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1953.
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
On “Modern Love”
Bogner, Delmar. “The Sexual Side of Meredith’s Poetry” Victorian Poetry 8, no. 2 (Summer 1970): 107–25.
Bonnecase, Denis. “Meredith’s Modern Love: Showing/Speaking/Acting Out.” Études Anglaises 57, no. 1 (2004): 39–52.
Comstock, Cathy. “‘Speak, and I see the side-lie of a truth’: The Problematics of Truth in Meredith’s ‘Modern Love.’” Victorian Poetry 25, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 129–41.
Cox Wright, Elizabeth. “The Significance of Image Pattern in Meredith’s Modern Love.” Victorian Newsletter 13 (Spring 1958): 1–9.
Crowell, Kenneth. “Modern Love and the Sonetto Caudato: Comic Intervention through the Satiric Sonnet Form.” Victorian Poetry 48, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 539–57.
Fletcher, Pauline. “‘Trifles light as air’ in Meredith’s ‘Modern Love.’” Victorian Poetry 34, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 87–99.
Friedman, Norman. “The Jangled Harp—Symbolic Structure in Modern Love.” Modern Language Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1957): 9–26.
Going, William T. “A Note on ‘My Lady’ of Modern Love.” Modern Language Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1946): 311–14.
Houston, Natalie. “Affecting Authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 35, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 99–121.
Kincaid, James. “‘The Poem Says’: Meredith’s Modern Love.” In Annoying the Victorians, 135–48. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Kowalczyk, Richard. “Moral Relativism and the Cult of Love in Meredith’s Modern Love.” Research Studies 37 (1969): 38–53.
Mermin, Dorothy. “Poetry as Fiction: Meredith’s Modern Love.” ELH 43, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 100–19.
Mitchell, Rebecca N. “George Meredith’s Poetry and the Critical Imagination.” Literature Compass 8, no. 3 (March 2011): 142–50.
Pinch, Adela. “Love Thinking.” Victorian Studies 50, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 379–97.
. “Transatlantic Modern Love.” In The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange. Ed. Meredith L. McGill, 160–84. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Reader, Willie D. “The Autobiographical Author as Fictional Character: Point of View in Meredith’s ‘Modern Love.’” Victorian Poetry 10, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 131–43.