Rejected - Analysis

A manual for masculine heartbreak

Lawson’s poem reads like a blunt set of instructions for what a rejected man is supposed to look like, even as it quietly proves that the performance can’t hold. The speaker addresses you—and then punctures the pose over and over with the refrain hit, old man hard hit. The central claim feels unsentimental but fierce: rejection doesn’t merely sadden you; it breaks you, and the very effort to appear unaffected becomes part of the pain.

The stiff walk that can’t hide the stagger

The first scene is all posture. You say Good-bye, you stand off a yard, you lift your hat, and you walk mighty stiff and straight. But the poem immediately adds the body’s betrayal: at the corner you stagger just a bit. That tiny wobble matters because it’s the poem’s recurring logic—no matter how controlled the exit looks, the mind keeps reheating the answer that she gave. Even bravery is redefined as a kind of containment: a man’s strong heart is brave when it’s hit, meaning courage becomes the act of not collapsing in public rather than not hurting.

Drink, the barmaid, and the insult of coarseness

When you try to drown the sorrow, the drink’s no effect, and the bar—often imagined as refuge—turns unbearable. The barmaid’s coarse and vulgar wit repels you not because you’ve become morally refined overnight, but because heartbreak has made everything else feel wrong in texture and tone. The poem sharpens this by forcing a comparison: the lost woman’s face carries pity, and she is to the barmaid as is snow to chimney grit. That simile isn’t just about class or taste; it shows how rejection can make memory cruelly pristine, whitening the beloved until ordinary company feels like grime.

Private theatrics in a boarding-house world

Once you reach your lodgings, the poem stages a second performance—this time of solitary dignity. You shun the other boarders, knit your manly brow, and go directly to your room. Yet the poem refuses the fantasy of privacy: the whole house knows you’re hit. Inside, the controlled man becomes a frantic body—clutching the scarf and collar, tearing them from the throat, ripping the waistcoat, flinging the made-to-order coat into a corner. The detail of that tailored coat is quietly devastating: even the careful investment in appearance, respectability, and self-making gets treated like clutter when the heart is in revolt.

Love versus vanity: the poem’s bluntest admission

The poem names a tension many love-poems dodge: It’s doubtful whether vanity or love has suffered worst. Rejection wounds affection, but it also humiliates—your self-image, your imagined future, your belief that you were chosen. Lawson doesn’t resolve the conflict; he insists they are interknit. That’s why the grief feels both noble and embarrassing. For a while you’re a better man and nobler—pain can purify—but it also makes you wish the heart would burst, as if the body could be punished into relief.

When the beloved becomes a ghost, and tears become a privilege

As thinking turns obsessive—think and think until you’re mad almost—the past becomes spectral: spectres of the bygone, and even the very girl herself seems dead and returns as a ghost. The tone here is darker and more helpless than the earlier stiff-upper-lip comedy; rejection starts to resemble haunting, not just disappointment. Then comes one of the poem’s most pointed turns: women have the privilege of tears. It’s not simply envy; it’s an indictment of a rule that makes male suffering lonelier by forcing it to be silent, sideways, and half-disguised as irritation, drinking, or pacing.

A partial morning, a long bruise

The ending refuses melodramatic finality. Sleep brings things have brightened up a bit, but the injury remains for many evenings, a cracked heart in a sling. That image makes heartbreak both physical and strangely ordinary—something you carry, something that limits movement, something other people can see even if you never say a word. The refrain has trained us to hear the truth behind every controlled gesture: you can exit to the gate with manners intact, but the poem’s verdict stays the same—when you’re rejected, you are hard hit, and all your composure is only the wrapping around the bruise.

The poem’s uncomfortable question

If the whole house already knows, what exactly is the stoic performance for? The poem suggests it isn’t protection from others so much as an attempt to protect your own pride—yet Lawson keeps showing how pride and love arrive tangled, so that even the act of hiding becomes another way of being hit.