four sets of internally rhyming quatrains, where the final quatrain either sums up the poem's drift or else serves as a turning point that takes the meaning in a new direction. In this way it corresponds roughly to the final couplet of the conventional Shakespearian sonnet. It was suggested to Meredith at the time that the form was modelled on the Italian caudate sonnet and, although he was dismissive of this attempt to find an orthodox ancestry for his work, the possibility continues to be discussed. Rather than continuity, the poet's theme is disruption within the marriage and this is further mirrored in disruption of the normal iambic pentameter within lines, especially by breaking up the narrative with frequent caesuras and enjambing the sense over lines. Often ambiguous in any case, the meaning is made harder to follow because of the confusion over whether it is the voice of the narrator or the husband's inner dialogue we are hearing. A further level of ambiguity occurs in the different linguistic registers of wording, often in close proximity to each other, which make the author's intention unclear. In the third quatrain of sonnet 50, for example, the archaic word 'dole' in the line "Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole," is followed immediately by the alliterating colloquialism of "Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul": a prosaic response to the poetic. In similar fashion, the "tragic hints" thundering oceanically in the final stanza leave no more than a "faint thin line upon the shore". Themes The sequence is an early example of mid-Victorian questioning of the values of its time, in this case by examining the interpersonal tensions of a loveless marriage from which the partners cannot escape because of the contemporary legal restrictions on divorce. As a novelist, Meredith had already used the failure of his own marriage as material for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). In his poetical treatment of the subject, with its ironical echoes of older works of the "and they lived happily ever after" kind, his focus is upon the mismatch between the idealised expectations of marriage founded on such literature and having to dissimulate disappointment in them in order to meet societal conventions. An objective consideration of the place and rights of women is hindered, since the narration is all from the husband's side in the sequence. The ambiguity of distinguishing between the narrator's