Ben Jonson plays with a sly, old-fashioned conceit: women are like shadows to men. The speaker, with a mix of wit and self-satisfaction, points out a paradox in courtship. Pursue a woman, and she pulls away—exactly like a shadow that flees when you follow it. But turn your back or seem indifferent, and suddenly she’s chasing you, just as a shadow follows someone who walks away. His tone isn’t angry; it’s more of a smug, half-amused riddle posed among friends.
The second stanza deepens the comparison by tracking a shadow’s length through the day: longest at morning and evening, all but gone at noon. That becomes a measure of male ego. When a man is at his lowest or most vulnerable, his “shadow”—the woman—looms large and powerful. But in his moment of imagined perfection, she barely registers. The whole poem has a light, epigrammatic feel, like a clever toast that raises eyebrows and invites knowing laughter, even if the logic is a little too tidy to be taken seriously.