plaster now? (God was hewn from
stone, but he is smashed to bits.)
How do you live with one of a
thousand women after Lilith? 40Sated with newness, are you?
Now you are grown cold to magic,
how is your life with an
earthly woman, without a sixth
sense? Tell me: are you happy? 45
Not? In a shallow pit How is
your life, my love? Is it as
hard as mine with another man?Poem Summary
The title is interesting for its suggestion that the
poem is merely an attempt at jealousy, as if the
speaker is not really jealous but has to try to
appear jealous for some reason. Perhaps that is
the point: the speaker is trying to appear indif-
ferent or nonchalant, as if not caring about her
rival, trying to make it seem that her rival is not
worth being jealous over.
Stanza 1
After suggesting that her ex-lover’s life must be
simpler now with another woman, the speaker
conjures up an image of rowing, as if the ex-lover
is rowing away, gliding on the water, away from
the speaker, who is represented as both an island
and a coastline. There is a calmness here that
belies the storminess to come, perhaps suggest-
ing how easy it was for the ex-lover to leave.
Stanza 2
The speaker at this point seems merely curious to
know how long it took the memory of her to
disappear, as if this were merely an idle inquiry.
At the same time she describes herself as a float-
ing island, floating in the sky, not on the water.
Perhaps the significance of the island here is that
the speaker is somehow high above, not down
below with her ex-lover.
Sarcasm now emerges in the poem, as the
speaker suggests that her ex-lover and his new
woman will be not lovers but sisters. This seems
a jab at her ex-lover’s masculinity and also per-
haps an expression of hope that what goes on
between him and the new woman will not be
sexual love but something platonic. The
references to them as spirits or souls may also
suggest that any love between them will be
nonphysical.Stanza 3
In the third stanza the speaker’s feelings become
more intense. She describes her rival as ordinary
and herself as a sort of god or monarch. Her
former lover has abandoned the divine or royal
life with her and has gone down to something
lower. There is an image of revolution here, of a
sovereign being forced from the throne, just as
the Russian tsar was forced from his, resulting in
a sort of descent not only by the sovereign but by
those who overthrew the sovereign; the tsar or
queen or spurned woman has been hurt, but the
one doing the spurning has been hurt as well, at
least in the speaker’s view.Stanza 4
The nature of the hurt is elaborated on in the
fourth stanza. The former lover, it seems, must
deal with endless banality and commonplaceness
with the new woman. The speaker even affects to
feel sorry for him. The poem’s aim has quickly
become to make the former lover feel the speak-
er’s contempt and also to feel that he is paying a
tax or a high price for abandoning the speaker.Stanza 5
The fifth stanza begins by varying the pattern
whereby the speaker has been asking more and
more insistent and belittling questions. For its
first two lines, the speaker allows the ex-lover to
speak, though of course it is really the speaker
remembering something the ex-lover said,
namely, his explanation for leaving, which is
that life with the speaker had contained too
many emotional upheavals.
Interestingly, the speaker does not dispute
the characterization of life with her as one
involving emotional upheavals or, to follow
another translation, anxiety and discomfort.
That perhaps is the price to pay for being with
the speaker, a price that she thinks is well worth
it, because she after all is goddess-like and her
rival is a nobody.Stanza 6
The rest of the poem builds on this contrast
between divinity and commonplaceness, offer-
ing a variety of references to divinities from dif-
ferent traditions. These divinities are mostly
ways of describing the speaker. For instance,AnAttemptatJealousy