Happy Birthday to poet and novelist George Meredith, b.1828, of whom Oscar Wilde said, “”Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.” (Wilde had an opinion on everything and everyone, didn’t he?)

Meredith wrote one novel that I’ve read, Diana of the Crossways.

I’ve also read a series of sonnets that Meridith wrote, called Modern Love, in which he worked out his feelings about his wife who three years after their marriaage deserted him and ran away with a Pre-Raphaelite artist. (Those Pre-Raphaelites!) the sonnet sequence consists of fifty sonnets tracing the decay and the death of a romance and a marriage. Rather a sad subject for the advent of Valentine’s Day. Think of it as an antidote to all the hearts and flowers clogging the airways.

It is the season of the sweet wild rose,
My Lady’s emblem in the heart of me!
So golden-crownèd shines she gloriously,
And with that softest dream of blood she glows:
Mild as an evening heaven round Hesper bright!
I pluck the flower, and smell it, and revive
The time when in her eyes I stood alive.
I seem to look upon it out of Night.
Here’s Madam, stepping hastily. Her whims
Bid her demand the flower, which I let drop.
As I proceed, I feel her sharply stop,
And crush it under heel with trembling limbs.
She joins me in a cat-like way, and talks
Of company, and even condescends
To utter laughing scandal of old friends.
These are the summer days, and these our walks.

Ouch. I hope if you send your love roses for Valentine’s Day, they fare better than the one in the poem.