The poem begins by taking itself back. "I wish I could say I am happy for you" is a phrase people use to be gracious, but the word "wish" gives the game away: if the sentence needed wishing for, it isn't true. From there the speaker rebuilds a loss as a win. Someone once admired has been seen clearly, and the speaker decides this clarity is a prize. The central idea is that disillusionment can be presented as happiness, and that this presentation is itself a kind of mask.
The second line is the longest and the most prose-like, as if the speaker has stopped being intimate and started to lecture. "It will be pleasing to claim a superior understanding of how the world works and how people sometimes don't." The verb is "claim," not "have," so the understanding is something asserted, perhaps a little too eagerly. The speaker also admits to an unattractive pleasure: the pleasure of feeling superior. Then comes a dry joke in the closing phrase, since "how people sometimes don't" treats people like faulty machines that occasionally fail to work. The word "sometimes" is almost polite, and the politeness stings.
Then the speaker bursts out: "Truly, I am happy!" The exclamation mark and the insistent "Truly" protest a little too much. The next line break is the poem's sharpest turn: "For me," and then a pause. The happiness is not on the other person's behalf, as the opening promised, but entirely the speaker's own. What follows, "That you're off the menu of possible regrets," is a fragment, a dependent clause with no main verb to hold it up. The grammar seems to wobble just where the claim of happiness is supposed to stand firmly. The "menu" metaphor is cold and commercial. Regrets are dishes one might order, and this person has been struck from the list, reduced from someone loved or admired to an item on offer.
The final line is the longest sentence, and it ends in a blow. Before it, the person was "the hero," so the speaker once idealised them. The expected comma after "hero" is missing, so "the hero just the face" runs on in a rush. "Yanked" is a violent verb, and its hard sounds, the k in "yanked" and "mask," land like a tug. Notice the tenses: the speaker "will not be" haunted by the hero, but the unmasking is already done in the past. Notice too what is left behind: not a villain, only "the face." Under the mask there is nothing monstrous, just something ordinary. The speaker demotes the person rather than demonising them, which may be the cruellest option.
The title and the bracketed word beneath it add a second layer. A harbor is a place of shelter, so the person may once have been a safe haven. But "to harbor" is also a verb, as in harboring a grudge, and the poem's mix of politeness and resentment makes that reading hard to ignore. The poem does not choose between them, and the ambiguity suits a speaker who says one thing and means another. "Unmasked" names what the speaker did to the other person, but it also describes what the poem does to the speaker.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only free verse in lines of very uneven length: a short opening, a sprawling second line, two clipped lines, then the long final one. It reads like someone beginning composed, running on to justify themselves, trying to recover with an exclamation, and finally dropping the pretence. The only real echo is the repeated "happy," and the second use contradicts the first.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a petty emotion. We are used to poems that end in forgiveness or grief, but this speaker admits to relief and a small satisfaction in being right. The last line also undercuts the claim of freedom, because the speaker still says "when I think of you." The mask has come off the other person, but the speaker's own gracious opening is slipping too.