The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband

Here is a husband so threatened by a book that he writes poetry about his jealousy. Published in 1908, this droll verse narrative follows a man watching helplessly as his wife becomes utterly spellbound by Edward FitzGerald's famous translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. She quotes it at breakfast. She dreams of wine-stained pages. She has eyes only for those quatrains. Meanwhile, he sits neglected, a mere footnote to her new literary passion. The husband's bemused, wounded, occasionally furious verses trace the arc of a man being cuckolded by a poem. Little writes with sharp comic timing and genuine tenderness beneath the satire, capturing that peculiar ache of competing with something as harmless and enchanting as a book. It's a tiny, peculiar artifact of early American humor, precisely of its era yet strangely universal: anyone who has ever felt second to a lover's obsession will recognize themselves in these pages.