The Director | Poems of Despair

The Director's Dark Cut

My impulsive child

astride a white swan,

gallops away from Parnassus.

Calliope is incandescent.

She has cast her morals

down the gorge and claims

to be faithful to a reckless man

who wants to make her happy.

Such folly, we both know

happiness is only fit for fools.

A waste of spirit, she was born

to be the queen of verse.

Perhaps even to tower over Plath.

And what of me? Still pretending

to be a minstrel but without a song.

Our wasted gifts:

we needed each other’s pain to thrive.

I scold myself each morning,

poetry is not a serious job.

Perhaps I ought to learn to be a man

with wealth, power, and gravitas.

It's always the same though.

When night falls, I worry

I'm beginning to be sensible.

My fate has always been to live

inside the eye of the storm.

Wearing my Venetian mask

I step onto the stage with such

panache, an actor extraordinaire.

Yet each day, I sink into her world

of familiar turmoil and the endless

cycle begins once more.

Was I in truth the supreme director?

I wrote the script and had assembled

a troupe of two-bit actors for my story,

but now the film is in the cutting room.

The editor has in mind another version.

Part of the mosaics cycle of poems

A few words about the poem…

Poems of Despair: Performance, Authorship, and the Illusion of Control in The Director

The Director from the series Poems of Despair, confront not only emotional suffering but the deeper structures that give suffering meaning. The poem, which belongs to the cycle Mosaics, is a striking example of this tradition. Rather than offering a direct lament, the poem stages despair as a form of intellectual drama, where love, identity, and artistic vocation become entangled in a subtle exploration of loss, loneliness, and sadness.

From the opening stanza, the poem establishes a tension between artistic destiny and ordinary happiness. The beloved is described as having abandoned “Parnassus,” a symbolic departure from poetic aspiration in favour of lived experience. This choice is framed not simply as a personal decision but as a moral failure. The speaker interprets happiness as a betrayal of a higher calling, reducing it to something “fit for fools.” In this worldview, despair is not accidental but necessary. It becomes the price of artistic seriousness, while happiness appears vulgar, shallow, and unworthy of depth.

This initial judgement already reveals the poem’s central conflict. The speaker does not merely mourn a lost relationship; he resents the beloved for choosing life over suffering; toxic love, in this sense, is not defined by cruelty or manipulation, but by incompatible values. One character seeks emotional survival, the other aesthetic meaning. Their bond collapses because it was sustained by shared pain rather than mutual care. The line “We needed each other’s pain to thrive” articulates this logic with brutal clarity. Love becomes a mechanism for generating despair, not alleviating it.

Yet the poem refuses to leave the speaker in a position of moral superiority. Almost immediately, the narrative turns inward. The question “And what of me?” shifts the focus from accusation to self-examination. The image of the minstrel without a song exposes a hollow identity. The speaker claims the role of poet but lacks the creative substance to justify it. This is a crucial moment, because it reveals that the condemnation of the beloved may conceal deeper insecurity. The speaker’s despair is not only about loss, but about the fear that his own suffering has failed to produce anything meaningful.

Here, loneliness takes on a complex form. It is not merely the absence of the beloved, but the absence of a coherent self. The speaker is isolated within his own performance, pretending to inhabit a vocation that no longer feels authentic. His sadness is not only emotional but existential. He does not know who he is without the narrative of shared suffering that once defined the relationship.

The middle stanzas deepen this crisis by introducing social and cultural pressures. The speaker imagines abandoning poetry in favour of wealth, power, and gravitas. This fantasy is framed ironically, as something to be “learned,” suggesting that social authority is as artificial as artistic identity. Yet the temptation is real. It represents a desire to escape despair by adopting externally validated roles. If poetry leads only to loneliness and loss, perhaps conformity offers a safer form of meaning.

However, this alternative proves equally unsatisfying. The speaker admits that when night falls, he worries he is “beginning to be sensible.” Sensibility, usually associated with maturity and balance, becomes a source of anxiety. To become sensible is to accept limitation, to relinquish the grand narratives that justify suffering. In this line, despair reveals itself as addictive. The speaker fears not pain, but recovery. Toxic love has trained him to equate intensity with authenticity, and ordinary life now feels like betrayal.

At first glance, the figure of the “impulsive child” appears to refer to a specific person, one who turns away from the demands of art toward the promise of a simpler happiness. Yet the imagery complicates this reading. The presence of Parnassus, the white swan, and Calliope places the figure within a symbolic and mythic register. What we are witnessing is not merely a personal fall, but a staged departure from artistic vocation. The act is not passive. She does not lose her place; she abandons it. In casting her morals down the mountain, she performs a deliberate rejection of the discipline and severity that art requires.

The metaphor of living “in the eye of the storm” captures this condition perfectly. The speaker exists in a suspended state, neither fully committed to despair nor capable of escaping it. He inhabits a false calm surrounded by emotional chaos. This is not heroic suffering but stagnation. The storm continues, but the speaker remains motionless at its centre, protected yet imprisoned by his own narrative.

The theatrical imagery that follows reinforces this instability of identity. The narrator steps onto the stage with measured confidence, “with such panache,” assuming the role of an actor who appears in control of his performance. Yet this composure is immediately undermined by repetition. Each day, he sinks once more into the familiar turmoil of her world. The movement is not forward but circular. The performance does not liberate him; it binds him to the same pattern. The self that performs and the self that suffers are no longer distinct.

This cyclical pattern is one of the poem’s most disturbing features. Despair is no longer a crisis but a habit. Sadness loses its urgency and becomes predictable, almost comfortable. Toxic love persists not through passion, but through repetition. The speaker returns to suffering because it is familiar, not because it is meaningful.

The final stanza introduces the poem’s most radical shift. The speaker questions whether he was ever truly the “supreme director” of the story. This doubt dismantles the entire framework of authority established earlier. The claim to authorship—the belief that he wrote the script and assigned roles—collapses under scrutiny. The transition from theatre to film is significant. In film, meaning is not created in the moment of performance, but in the process of editing. Control is deferred, distributed, and ultimately lost.

The editor, who “has in mind another version,” becomes the poem’s most powerful figure. Unlike the speaker, the editor is anonymous, impersonal, and external. This suggests that memory, time, and survival are the true forces shaping the narrative. The speaker’s despair, once treated as destiny, is revealed as provisional. His interpretation of toxic love may not survive the editing process. The story will be revised, whether he consents or not.

This ending is deeply unsettling because it offers no redemption. The poem does not replace despair with hope or sadness with insight. Instead, it removes the speaker’s authority altogether. He is no longer the hero of his suffering, nor even its author. He becomes material to be reworked by forces beyond his control.

In this sense, the poem exemplifies the most honest form of Poems of Despair. It does not aestheticize suffering or present loneliness as noble. Instead, it exposes the subtle ways in which despair can become ideology. The speaker’s attachment to sadness is not tragic in the romantic sense, but tragic in its futility. He has built an identity around loss, only to discover that loss does not guarantee meaning.

The final insight of the poem is therefore bleak but precise: suffering does not make one significant, and pain does not confer authorship. Toxic love is not intense because it is profound, but because it is unresolved. Loneliness persists not because it is necessary, but because it has been mistaken for destiny.

By ending with revision rather than revelation, the poem refuses closure. It leaves the reader not with answers, but with the unsettling recognition that despair itself may be subject to editing. And in that possibility lies the poem’s quiet, paradoxical power: not the promise of escape, but the recognition that even sadness is not finally ours to command.