Maud And Other Poems Book

You can tell how new a thing this was, and how controversial Meredith must have known it would be, in the way his brilliant, lucid, lightning-lit outbursts frequently retreat into what, for me, were sections of indistinct jibber-jabbering. It was as if his courage to voice the harsh truth only lasted so long, and had to be recharged by dipping into a bitter well, which dippings were full of opaque and insubstantial references to symbols and bits of history that must have had intense personal significance, but for a (currently) modern reader, 150 years later, felt like dead spots, as if all that Victorian tip-toeing wore soft spots in the meaning, and those spots had since gone to rot. If the final stanzas weren't one of those spots, if it had ended with something honest instead of vague images of poetic mainstays, I'd have walked away with the frisson I had in the middle, instead of the feeling I now have: like there must have been more than 50 stanzas, right?, he can't have meant to end there, could he?