Praise is rarely this nervous. Meredith's speaker opens with a declaration, "Full faith I have", and spends sixteen lines finding out how little that faith can settle him. He admires a woman because she has "the rarest gift / To beauty, Common Sense," yet he ends by longing for "Shrieking Bacchantes with their souls of wine." The poem is about the gap between what a man believes he should want and what some restless part of him wants anyway.
It is one numbered poem in the *Modern Love* sequence, a series of sixteen-line poems that follows the breakdown of a marriage. The poem works without that context, but the context explains its tone: the speaker examines his own feelings like a stranger's, and he doesn't entirely trust the results.
The form suits that self-distrust. The four quatrains each use enclosed rhyme: *gift / lie / sky / uplift*, then *mouth / address / less / drouth*, then *man / head / dead / can*, and finally *opine / asp / clasp / wine*. In each, the outer rhymes wrap around an inner pair, so the sound keeps folding back on itself, like a mind going round a problem. The rhythm is loosely iambic pentameter, but the syntax keeps tripping it. The opening sentence delays its verb across three lines ("To see her lie … would almost wreck the faith"), and the parenthesis "(Can it kiss sweetly? sweetly!)" interrupts the poem's flow to let the speaker question himself and answer in the same breath. Here the voice sounds like a man talking himself into conviction.
The imagery of the first quatrain is strained, and the strain is deliberate. The speaker pictures her lying with her face "an inverted sky / Bloom-covered, while the underlids uplift". As far as the image can be read, she is lying with her face upturned and her eyes closing. Her beauty, seen at rest, is so decorative that it would "almost wreck" his faith in her sense. Only when her mouth speaks to "the inner me" does he feel reassured, and his triumphant "I am matched; that I am man!" sounds a little too loud for someone who has just needed to reassure himself.
The second half undoes that triumph. The "restless corner of my heart or head" is vague on purpose, since he cannot say whether the trouble is feeling or thought. It "holds a dying something never dead," a paradox that suggests a desire he has tried to put to sleep. He concedes that "Nature giveth all she can," so the fault is not in what he has been given. That archaic "giveth" lends the line a mock-biblical solemnity, and the next sentence deflates it. "It means, that woman is not, I opine, / Her sex's antidote" is stiff, almost lawyerly; "opine" turns a crisis into a proposition. The logic, though, is neat and unflattering: "Who seeks the asp / For serpent's bites?" If woman is the source of his trouble, she can hardly also be the cure.
Water and wine frame the poem's logic. Early on, the speaker "thirsts" and has been "languishing in drouth," an old form of *drought*. A sensible companion might be expected to quench that thirst, but the final line reaches for wine, and wild, intoxicated women, the Bacchantes, followers of the wine-god. The last sentence is the most revealing. "'Twould calm me" promises calm, yet what would supposedly calm him is frenzy. The man who has just praised common sense confesses that it is not what he craves.
The poem matters because it refuses the tidy ending. A more comforting poem would stop at "I am matched." Meredith lets the speaker undercut himself, so that rational compatibility and desire emerge as two separate needs which one person may not satisfy. The poem also lets us see the speaker's limits. He sorts women into types, the sensible and the wild, and never asks what the woman herself wants, which may be the poem's quietest irony. Readers are left to decide how far to trust him, and that uncertainty is much of what makes the poem feel modern.