FOR ALMOST A CENTURY AND A HALF GEORGE MEREDITH'S MODERN LOVE HAS been recognized as a challengingly, troublingly modern poem. Successive generations found it contemporary and pertinent. In 1862 poem irked and even scandalized reviewers for its disturbing tastelessness and for what seemed its vulgar, amoral undressing of marital relations. young Swinburne, an avatar of new and shocking, was rare among poem's first reviewers for his admiring letter in Spectator of that year. (1) Apprehension about poem's indecency, however, quickly yielded to apprecitations of its art and then examinations of its richness in form, in style, in narration, and in imagery. Meredith mimes courtly sonnet tradition to reveal a tale of marital disarray. poem's images, which have been widely discussed, combine to depict domestic scenes from this marriage, scenes that are sharp, lucid, and forceful. emotions--essentially those of husband--highlight personal tensions and interpersonal games of couple (what might now be termed the family dynamics). Meredith's form, his images, and his attention to psychology 'all contribute to sense of modernity in Modern Love. Especially contemporary in their feel are often scathing domestic vignettes that alternate with lyric passages, that sustain narrative of poem, and that we are likely to find so vivid and striking. Much of power and effect of Modern Love derives from them, though they have drawn little critical attention. opening sonnet, which elegantly introduces, encapsulates, and anticipates rest of poem, begins--almost epic-style--in medias res: By this he knew she wept with waking eyes. (2) thrust of poem will be psychological. setting is couple's bedroom, focusing our attention on its centerpiece, their common bed. crisply delineated scene, like so many that follow, is wincingly familiar. husband is cognizant of his wife's misery, sensitive to her strange low sobs. Behind stone-stillness and silence of this dismal midnight, Each [is] wishing for sword that severs all. images of stone-tomb, serpents, venom, eyes, silence, and knives all appear in this stanza and are elaborated thereafter. Whatever ramifications each individual image will carry, it also contributes effectively to dramatic tableau Meredith constructs. sword may have chivalric and even biblical resonances, and it prefigures fatal of closing sonnet. But both sword and knife also convey psychological state of marriage: commonplace fantasy of wishing for blade (sword or ax) that would sever all and free one. It is a fantasy that is only incidentally homicidal or fatal; its primary impulse is to get out, to be cut clear. Part of Meredith's genius is to insinuate inexorable indirect consequences. dearth of love is fatal--in this case literally, always emotionally. As a story of a failed marriage, poem is appropriately focused on bed, and periodically returns to it. once-rapturous bed gone amok is a succinct metaphor for strain and disarray in husband and wife's relationship. Few furnishings more concisely record stresses and discordancies in a marriage. Orson Welles ingeniously exchanged bed for breakfast table that expands with every cut in infamous scene calibrating distance between Kane and Emily in Citizen Kane. Other artists have used opposing books, color schemes, rooms, and like to register disaffection. Meredith audaciously (for 1862) rejects any such indirection or euphemism, establishing primacy of this setting. In sonnet 15, husband watches Madam sleep--alternately reflecting on how image of Othello, The Poet's black stage-lion of wronged love, / Frights not our modern dames (an ironic simile considering Desdemona's innocence) and on how pure his wife's sleep seems. Rather than reinforcing happy, romantic memories, however, lyric concludes with his perusing her current love letter: The words are very like: name is new. …