The Laboratory Jealousy Quotes

We think this is at the heart of what jealousy is all about. It's not just that "he is with her" and that you've been dumped. It's that they know how bad it makes you feel. That's what really makes it ache, that feeling that they are doing all this just to hurt you, or to humiliate you.

This is what's really driving our speaker. She feels like she's being made fun of, that her former lover and his new girlfriend are laughing at her. Maybe this is where she starts to step over the line too, from the kind of jealousy that anyone might feel, to something a little bit weirder. Honestly, we think she sounds a little paranoid here, a little obsessed with her own imagination about what's going on.

Okay, now she's just being a jerk. It's hidden by all the poetic language, but basically she's saying this new girl is fat. That's jealousy talking, for sure. But come on, be honest. Maybe you've been through a bad breakup, and maybe you found yourself crying into your second pint of ice cream, and maybe you've let something like that slip out. Not that we'd know anything about breakups, or crying, or ice cream…

There's a little more crazy-jealous talk here. One of the things that sticks out for us is that the speaker never blames the guy. It's the other woman who "ensnared him." It's almost like he never had a say in the whole thing, and just accidentally found himself running off with a new girl. We're not buying it, but we've definitely seen this kind of thing before. This part of the poem reads like a nineteenth-century reality show to us, like if Robert Browning had thought up Cheaters 150 years early.

This is why Browning is awesome. He can make a whole scene come to life in just a few lines. Can't you just see this happening in real life? You're watching the guy (or girl) you like talking to someone across the room, and you stare extra hard, just to let them know they aren't fooling anyone. We're pretty sure anyone who has been to a middle school dance has felt this kind of heartbreak.