walking on Mount Sinai with a divinity or being
in the presence of royalty; it was like living with
the finest marble instead of a cheap imitation or
experiencing a time of magic. The present that
the speaker imagines for her lover is immeasur-
ably inferior to the divine time to which she
keeps referring.
Tsvetaeva’s nostalgia, it is noteworthy, does
not stem just from the passage of time but from a
specific and misguided action. It was the lover’s
deliberate decision to leave her for an unworthy
rival that destroyed the paradise that they had
together. Just as Adam and Eve forfeited para-
dise by an act of disobedience, thus did the
dethronement of the sovereign in Tsvetaeva’s
poem mean the destruction of a past so nostal-
gically remembered.
Revolution
‘‘An Attempt at Jealousy’’ is not on the surface a
political poem, but it contains political implica-
tions especially relevant to Tsvetaeva’s own life.
The third stanza, with its reference to the over-
throw of a monarch, though on the surface refer-
ring to the speaker as the monarch, also conjures
up thoughts of the Russian tsar, overthrown in
Tsvetaeva’s lifetime. This poem thus fits in with
Tsvetaeva’s political nostalgia for a time before
the Russian Revolution, in her view a superior
time of artistic achievement before the revolu-
tionaries subjected Russia to rule by the masses.
It can thus be seen as a poem opposed perhaps to
revolution in general but more pointedly to the
Russian Revolution in particular.
Commercialism
Indirectly, Tsvetaeva’s poem is an indictment of
commercialism and ordinary life. She refers to
her rival as something bought in the market and
speaks of the price or tax her ex-lover must now
pay. The life of money and commerce, the life of
everyday things, is contrasted with a life of
divine magic. Tsvetaeva in real life devoted little
time to moneymaking and other mundane activ-
ities, as she sought to devote herself to art; this
poem expresses the notion that there is a sphere
far superior to the everyday world of market
goods, ordinary food, taxes, and vulgarity. In
this respect the poem is reminiscent of the
Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s work
titled ‘‘The World Is Too Much with Us.’’
Love as Magic and Miracle
Finally, the poem is a celebration of the magic
and miracles associated with the speaker and
with love. The speaker is able to float in the air;
she is or has been a deity or a queen; she had a
sixth sense and demonic powers; and the rela-
tionship with her was like a walk with God upon
Mount Sinai or like a statue of a god. It is not
entirely clear whether the speaker is suggesting
that she was divine or that the relationship
between her and the lover was divine; perhaps
both are implied. In any case, the idea is that love
with the speaker involved something magical,
divine, and perhaps demonic all at the same
time. This is perhaps meant to suggest something
about the nature of true love or just something
about the speaker.Style
Repetition
Tsvetaeva’s most obvious poetic device in this
poem is repetition. Over and over again, eleven
times altogether, the speaker asks the same ques-
tion of her departed lover: How is your life now
with the other woman? The force of the repeti-
tion becomes like hammer blows attacking the
old lover, building from a fairly innocuous refer-
ence to the rival simply as the other woman to
more insulting references calling her ordinary or
simple or a piece of merchandise from the mar-
ket or a piece of plaster dust. The movement of
the poem is from the asking of neutral questions
to the asking of loaded ones. But the point of the
matter is not just that the questions become
insulting; the very number of questions, the rep-
etition of the questions, becomes an attack in
itself, expressing the intense emotions of the
speaker by means of a relentless interrogation.Imagery in Opposition
The poem conjures up a number of images, not
all apparently consistent with one another but
most tending to depict a glorious, divine past, as
contrasted with a mundane, vulgar present; or to
put it another way, contrasting the glorious,
divine speaker with her mundane, vulgar rival.
The floating island in the sky suggests a superior
past, with the speaker hovering above; the image
of a sovereign being dethroned suggests the royal
nature of the speaker and of the relationship
with her; walking on Sinai suggests God and aAnAttemptatJealousy