Seven times a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature (tied with Ezra Pound, exceeded only by Thomas Hardy and Andre Malraux, who were nominated twelve and fifteen times respectively without winning), the Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith (1828–1909) was once described by William Michael Rossetti, of the famous family, as “a kind of limited Keats.” His poems explore territories smaller than Keats’s lush imaginative landscapes, but also, frequently, more immediately personal. Their tragedies are, we might say, the most banal human tragedies: the disintegration of a marriage, for example, in Meredith’s 1862 sequence of sixteen-line sonnet-like innovations, “Modern Love.” It would be easy not only to damn Meredith with faint praise, as Rossetti did, but to dismiss him altogether as a petty modern chronicler of domestic infelicity, a theme which also occupied him as a novelist. As a poet, however, in his sheer emotional and thematic range over a long career, Meredith invites some admiration. His long poem “The Lark Ascending,” published in 1881, recalls the pastoral sublimity of his Romantic forebears, Wordsworth and Shelley, and inspired a musical interpretation by the twentieth-century English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Meanwhile, the 1883 “Lucifer in Starlight” seems to reach back as far as Milton and “Paradise Lost,” resurrecting that poem’s vast doomed protagonist as a figure for futility, in a Petrarchan sonnet so thick with evocative language — where “sinners hugged their spectre of repose” — that even the dark angel’s defeat, as the constellations in their fixity stare him down, manages to feel, if not precisely victorious, still like a triumph of beauty. Lucifer in Starlight by George Meredith On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose. Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. And now upon his western wing he leaned, Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careened, Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows. Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
