Greetings, my fellow poets! I know it’s the merry month of May but we can’t be too merry belonging as we do (as occasion demands) to the Tortured Poets dVerse (see Taylor Swift) where we sorely test the muses with our sturm und drang.

Thus, our prompt for Poetics today has to do with those occasions where our sensitivities are most tried, when we’ve waited for a friend to show up for a previously planned lunch, a night on the town or a romantic date, and the minutes tick slowly by without a show and you realize you’ve been summarily stood up.

The most extreme example of being left in the lurch, of course, would be getting jilted at the altar on the day of your wedding.

Of the latter there are at least a couple of famous literary examples from short stories, e.g., the eponymous character in Katharine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Miss Emily.”

First, there’s Granny Weatherall, fragile only in health, not spirit, so much so that even death cannot humble her. Determined to the end to maintain control over every aspect of her life, she rues the moment when she lost control of it on her wedding day. Now on her deathbed, she remembers yet the man who left her at the altar sixty years before. “What does a woman do,” she asks herself, “when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn’t come?”

Then there’s Miss Emily Grierson and Homer Barron whose widely anticipated wedding day never materializes due to his mysterious disappearance. Faulkner takes us deep into the Southern Gothic and the thrilling, macabre revelation at the end which puts paid to the townsfolks’ lingering questions about Miss Emily, an aristocratic relic of another era whom time had passed by, as presumably had her suitor.

Carol Ann Duffy writes from the point of view of the wealthy, scheming Miss Havisham, the notorious character from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. She is often mistaken by readers to be elderly when in reality she is “scarcely forty,” but in her youth had been jilted on her wedding day. She is determined to make someone—anyone—pay for it with the same heartache she endures (though before she dies she repents her actions):

Miss Havisham by Carol Ann Duffy

Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then
I haven’t wished him dead. Prayed for it
so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,
ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.

Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole days
in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall; the dress
yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe;
the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this

to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words.
Some nights better, the lost body over me,
my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear
then down till I suddenly bite awake. Love’s

hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting
in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding cake.
Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.
Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.

---

What we have personally experienced may have been on a thankfully smaller scale, perhaps not so publicly humiliating as a fiancé failing to show for a wedding with the guests assembled, but devastating nonetheless. Depending on the person we’re waiting for, a bestie, a romantic partner, someone we’ve deemed trustworthy in whom we have invested a certain measure of expectation, when we realize we’ve been deliberately stood up, the sense of disappointment, even betrayal, can be deeply hurtful. The relationship at that point will have in some sense taken an irrecoverable turn.

The nineteenth-century poet and novelist Thomas Hardy speaks to this eye-opening, heart-revealing moment:

A Broken Appointment by Thomas Hardy

You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb,—
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.

You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
–I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?

---

Moments similar to these, where we have been left waiting fruitlessly at a rendezvous feeling cruelly spurned, perhaps for someone else, stay evergreen in our memory. As Edna St. Vincent Millay writes in this excerpt from her poem, “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”:

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.

---

Sylvia Plath writes more bluntly:

Jilted

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and tart,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart.

---

Sometimes when a rendezvous does occur, it can be spoiled by a lengthy unexplained delay.

After a Day of Waiting by Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

All day long I waited—waited with soul aflame—
And then through the still of evening, humming a tune, you came;
Came with a jest on your smiling lips, and eyes that were all too gay;
And the light died out of my waiting heart with the words that I could not say.

We laughed through the star-flecked twilight—what though my laugh was strained?
You, who were there beside me, laughed with a mirth unfeigned!
And at last when I bade you leave me you went, and you never knew
That with soul aflame I had waited, all through the day, for you.

---

How about the one who does the jilting? Though our sympathies may not lie with them, neither is it always a bed of roses as Plath writes in “To a Jilted Lover” which you can read here.

Now we have arrived at your challenge, if you’re up for it. Using the above poems as examples, write your own in the voice of one who has been stood up in no uncertain terms on a meaningful occasion. Duffy speaks through the imagined eyes of a character, Hardy and Plath from their experience, but your own take on the topic is what we’re after, imagined or otherwise. You could also write in the voice of one who does the jilting, giving her point of view. Or the long-term effect of that singularly painful moment in time. Or the humorous or relieved discovery of misunderstanding the time or place. Use movies, music, literature, art (including those pictured or mentioned above): whatever it takes to get your creative juices flowing. Whatever approach you choose, give free rein to your poetic sensibilities in this most fraught of shared human experience.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:
* Write a poem in response to the challenge.
* Post it on your blog and provide a link back to dVerse.
* Click on Mr. Linky below and enter your name and a link directly to your post; remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
* Read and comment on other poets’ work—AND
* Enjoy!

---

Pub closing time is 3 PM (EST) on Thursday.