George Meredith (1828-1909)

Modern Love XXX

 
 
 

What are we first? First, animals; and next

 

Intelligences at a leap; on whom

 

Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,

 

And all that draweth on the tomb for text.

 5

Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:

 

Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.

 

We are the lords of life, and life is warm.

 

Intelligence and instinct now are one.

 

But nature says: ‘My children most they seem

 10

When they least know me: therefore I decree

 

That they shall suffer.’ Swift doth young Love flee,

 

And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.

 

Then if we study Nature we are wise.

 

Thus do the few who live but with the day:

 15

The scientific animals are they.

 

Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes.

 
 

Sonnet Central has the entire Modern Love cycle.....

Remarks:

This splendid, bleak, righteous work is defiantly a sonnet despite its sixteen lines. (This is thirtieth in a cycle of fifty such examples.) The ironies of the final line, which rhetorically stands alone with a sudden (couplet-like) turn, are manifold.