You know the feeling. It's Friday and you get in from work after a couple of hours in traffic. You're tired and in need of some intellectual stimulus, so you log on to the Guardian books blog in search of entertainment, enlightenment, relief. But no, it's just Mills wittering on about poetry again. Oh well, maybe there'll be something better later on.
Disappointment: most of us have experienced it at some point in our lives. There must be those who sail through life without an unfulfilled dream or thwarted ambition, but I suspect they are not the norm. And after all, maybe a bit of frustration is no bad thing; or am I just kidding myself? One thing is certain, there's no shortage of disappointed poets in the world and it's probably not surprising that love is one of the main reasons why they end up feeling let down. In Li Po's (or is that Ezra Pound's?) The Jewel Stairs' Grievance , it is the lover's failure to turn up that disappoints. Dorothy Parker feels let down by the cheap tokens of love that are offered by her admirers; sometimes one perfect rose just isn't enough. For Marianne Moore, it is the institution of marriage that fails to meet expectations; she remained single. But of all the frustrations of love, perhaps the one that Aphra Behn addresses in her poem The Disappointment is, I suppose, the most fundamental; the maiden is eager, but her swain is unable to oblige.
Of course, love is not the only source of disappointment the poet may encounter. For Matthew Arnold on the "darkling plain" of Dover Beach, love may even be the one hope to cling to in the face of the great disappointment that is life itself. Basil Bunting's Chomei abandons the thwarted ambitions of his attempts at a career in the Imperial service for a life of monkish poverty and prayer. Unfortunately, he finds the petty restrictions of this new life just as irksome and frustrating as the one he had left behind.
Some poets have found discontent in specific places; for Robert Herrick it was "dull Devonshire", although he does admit that the lack of excitement was good for his writing. However, no matter how much of a let-down a place may be, C. P. Cavafy is quick to point out that moving is no cure; wherever you go, you carry your disappointments with you.
As Cavafy indicates, the sources of disappointment are often very close to home. WB Yeats frequently expressed his sense of frustration with his own poetry, but never more eloquently than in his poem The Fisherman. But it remains for Robert Frost to give expression to what is likely the single greatest disappointment of all. In his poem After Apple Picking, he evokes that deep sense of being let down that often accompanies the experience of getting exactly what you had wished for.
And so this week's call is for poems of disappointment and frustration. They may stem from an unrequited love, failed ambitions, or an inability to find a convenient parking place near work. As long as you don't disappoint me here, that's all that really matters, isn't it?