Even at his busiest, Meredith had continued to publish poems in periodicals, including substantial ones like ‘France, December 1870’, his stern exhortation to the beleaguered French (‘Now is humanity on trial in thee’) at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. Since his mid-50s he had been devoting more time to poetry, revising and extending ‘Love in the Valley’, adding the prefatory sonnet to ‘Modern Love’, and publishing five new volumes of verse. Here as in the novels he aims to illuminate ‘an expanded world’ for others, as Adiante is said to do in Celt and Saxon. Drawn as ever to epic subjects, he sometimes attempts this through character and action, notably in Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887). Indeed, the poet George MacBeth thought that ‘his best work is in his dramatic pieces’, such as the long ‘Nuptials of Attila’ and the shorter ‘King Harald's Trance’ – both from this volume, both ending in tragedy and confusion, and both with a woman as one of the victims. Even if Attila's reluctant new slave-bride was responsible for his death, and even if King Harald's treacherous and unfaithful wife deserved her fate, their ends seem pitiable. The scene in which King Harald suddenly sits bolt upright in his bed, kisses his sword, rises to his feet and slays his pregnant queen is particularly horrific, especially since he then doubles up and dies at his war-chiefs’ feet before he can slay her lover. Predictably, such poems were too much for Sassoon, who says of the former, ‘My soul craves for something gentler than “arrow, javelin, spear and sword”’, and despite MacBeth's praise they are not much read today.

In the more meditative poems, as in the novels as awhole, the aim is to encourage the reader to transcend the self, to reach out towards fellow human beings and upwards towards nature. The struggle here is still dramatic, but the drama is expressed in terms of life/death, light/dark imagery, and with reference to an even vaster time-scale – for this is the struggle not of an individual, a couple, or even a country at some point in history, but of the human race itself.