Discuss form in George Meredith's 'Modern Love'

George Meredith’s sonnet sequence Modern Love is a poetic act of looking back. His 1862 collection of poems explores the breakdown of a loveless marriage in which both subjects are trapped in stasis, the only freedom reached by the wife’s suicide.Meredith’s subversion of the traditional sonnet form in Modern Love, is fitting to the titular concerns of the poem. He has reimagined the sonnet to include 16 lines consisting of quatrains in the ABBA structure, moving away from traditional Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet forms of octaves, sestets and rhyming couplets. In doing so Meredith alludes to the traditional Romantic intentions of the sonnet, however reflects his modern appreciations of female sexual appetite in this radical modification. Meredith’s progressive reimagining of the sonnet, however, is undermined by its claustrophobic cyclical rhyme structure. The ABBA rhyming quatrains force readers to return to the first line when reading the last, making the poem a constant revisiting of that which has come before. This rhyming structure further reflects the futility of continuous revisitation of the past, the nature of which means something is lost in each recollection, leaving memory become increasingly fabricated as time goes on. This is reflected by the inferior effect of the A-A rhyme in comparison to the B-B rhyme, which in its return lacks the immediacy of the couplet it surrounds.The disparity in the poems narration exhibits its retention and obsession with the past. The retrospective first two sonnets are from an omniscient third person narrator, providing a level of objectivity to the events that occur. However that narrative soon glides smoothly to the first person present voice revealing the husband as both the narrator and subject of narration. The seamless movement into the past when the husband states ‘See that I am drawn to her even now’ suggest a loosening on what that ‘now’ is, and creates a lack of certainty of the chronology in the poem. This is most prevalent in the events of sonnet 42 and 45, where the wife's sudden decision to leave in the former is contradicted by her callous destruction of a flower in the latter, bringing her back into the immediate action of the poem.