In sixteen lines, a man threatens violence, waves away his rival, prays to God for help, and finally admits that the woman he is fighting over is already lost. The title places the poem inside a longer sequence called "Modern Love", but this piece works as a small drama on its own. Its central idea is that jealousy and grief can occupy the same mind at once, and that the first is often a way of dodging the second. The speaker wants to hurt someone. What he actually has to face is that "the woman" of the opening line is already in the past tense.
The poem opens like a man clearing his throat to move on to something else: "This was the woman; what now of the man?" The grammar already admits that she is over. Then comes a burst of brutality. The rival, "if he comes beneath a heel," will be "crushed until he cannot feel, / Or, being callous, haply till he can." The second half of that sentence is the more chilling, because it is a joke. If the man is too hardened to feel pain, the speaker will keep stamping until he does. The wit shows a mind that is trying to sound in control.
That control fails within a line: "But he is nothing:--nothing?" The repeated word, with its sudden question mark, stops the line mid-stride. The speaker cannot keep calling his rival nothing when he is watching the man become the centre of her attention. What he describes is a spotlight: "The rich light striking out from her on him!" Her eyes "swim / Across the man she singles, leaving dark / All else." The sentence spills over the line ending and swallows everything else into "dark." Light is the poem's governing image, and here it has been redirected. Her warmth is still there, but it now lands on somebody else, and the speaker admires it even as it wounds him.
In the middle of the poem his tone swerves again, into prayer and appetite. "Lord God, who mad'st the thing so fair, / See that I am drawn to her even now!" The word "thing" is odd and revealing. It sounds reverent and baffled at once, as if he cannot decide whether she is a person or a marvel. He talks himself toward a kiss on her "cool brow", and the word "cool" quietly sets her distance against his heat. "It cannot be such harm" is the language of someone bargaining with himself, and the very next line deflates it: "Yet if I meet him there!" He pictures the rival's claim written on her face.
The form tightens around this confusion. The poem is a sonnet that does not know when to stop, four quatrains instead of fourteen lines, and none of them offers the consoling couplet a sonnet might use to settle things. The rhyme scheme runs abba cddc effe ghhg, and each quatrain closes its own rhymes inside a wrapper, like a little trap. The rhythm is roughly iambic pentameter, steady enough to feel like a person trying to stay composed, but the punctuation keeps breaking it up with colons, dashes, exclamations and questions. Look at "But she is mine! Ah, no! I know too well." He claims her and retracts the claim inside a single line.
Then the light returns, now cold and distant: "I claim a star whose light is overcast: / I claim a phantom-woman in the Past." Repeating "I claim" turns possession into something almost pathetic, since a star behind cloud and a phantom are things nobody can hold. The capital on "Past" makes it feel like a place, and the poem has circled back to where its first line began. The last line, "The hour has struck, though I heard not the bell!", rhymes with "I know too well," so knowing and hearing are tied together. He has known for a while, but he has refused to listen.
What makes the poem significant is how it refuses to give its speaker dignity, and how it still makes him understandable. He is violent, possessive, tender and self-deceiving within a few lines, and the poem treats all of those as real. Love here is not a story with a villain. It is a mind caught between what it feels and what it knows, and the poem lets us see the exact moment the knowing wins.