How to actually analyze Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment"
Most people who write about this poem get it wrong because they treat it as just a bawdy joke from the Restoration period. It is not. The poem is about impotence anxiety and the weaponization of sexual disappointment, and the way Behn structures the speaker's voice does something fairly unusual for the era. The poem opens with an apostrophe to "Love" and quickly establishes a speaker who is bitterly frustrated. The literal scenario is a man who cannot perform sexually. The real content is about power, shame, and social reputation. When you write an analysis of this poem, start with the opening lines and track how the speaker shifts between self-pity and genuine menace. That shift is the whole point of the piece. Here is what most students miss. Behn is not simply writing a poem about a failed erection. She is writing about what happens when a man's sexual failure becomes public knowledge in a society where male honor is tied to sexual potency. The speaker's anger at the end of the poem is not comedic. It is threatening. He vows to expose or punish. Reading this as humor entirely misses the gender politics underneath.
The form is also doing work here. The poem uses a relatively tight structure with a somewhat regular rhyme scheme, which contrasts with the chaotic emotional state of the speaker. That contrast is intentional. Behn was a professional writer who understood that form creates meaning. Don't skip the formal analysis because the subject matter seems crude. When I was teaching this poem, I ran into a specific problem with my students: they kept wanting to talk about the sexual imagery without addressing the speaker's unreliable narration. They would quote lines about the "disappointed" lover and treat the narrator as a straightforward victim of Love's cruelty. The workaround I used was to have them rewrite the poem from the perspective of the abandoned partner. Within ten minutes, they saw that the narrator is the problem, not Love. For the analysis itself, break it into three parts. First, examine the opening invocation to Love and how it sets up the tone. Second, trace the physical description of failure and what it reveals about masculinity in the Restoration period. Third, analyze the ending where the speaker turns vengeful. The ending is where the poem becomes interesting.
One counter-intuitive point: many critics have questioned whether Behn actually wrote this poem. Some argue it could be by a male author or a collaborative effort. This matters for your analysis because if you cite the poem as definitively Behn's, a careful reader may challenge you. Check your source text. Look at the earliest editions. Make sure your attribution holds up. Another thing people overlook is the classical allusion layer. Behn frequently draws on Ovidian mythology, and "The Disappointment" is no exception. The poem references gods and Cupid-figures in ways that echo classical elegiac poetry. If your analysis does not mention the classical tradition, it is incomplete. For a practical step-by-step:
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Read the poem aloud three times. The rhythm matters more than you might expect. Identify every instance where the speaker shifts tone. Mark these in the margins. Research the historical context of sexual shame and reputation in late seventeenth-century England. You do not need a full essay on this, but one solid paragraph showing you understand the period will strengthen your analysis considerably.
Write a thesis that goes beyond "this poem is about sex." Try something like: the poem uses sexual failure as a vehicle to explore how masculinity is performed and policed in Restoration society. A limitation of this approach: you cannot properly analyze this poem without engaging with gender theory to some degree. If you are not comfortable with that framework, you will struggle to produce a useful reading. That is not a knock against you. It just means you should either invest time in learning the basics or acknowledge that limitation in your paper. I have seen several strong analyses that focused exclusively on the poetic devices and missed the social commentary entirely. I have also seen weaker analyses that leaned hard into cultural context while ignoring the actual language of the poem. Both approaches fail because they treat the text as either purely aesthetic or purely documentary. It is both.
If you want sources, start with the Norton Anthology of English Literature edition of Behn's work. Then look at recent scholarly articles from journals like Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre and Literature. Avoid older criticism that treats Behn primarily as a biographical curiosity. She wrote for money and she was sharp about it. Your analysis should reflect that. The actual download link for the poem text depends on which edition you are using. Project Gutenberg has a free copy if you search for Behn's Poems. University libraries will have annotated versions that include the variant readings, which can matter for this particular poem given the attribution debates. Write the analysis, check your citations, and stop overthinking the sexual content. It is a poem about sexual content, yes, but it is also about something else. That something else is what makes it worth analyzing.
