Anyone who has sat through an evening that went wrong will recognise the voice in "A Concert I Hated": the narrator who keeps a running tally of grievances and cannot stop adding to it. Nothing happens in the poem in the usual sense. It is a list of complaints that begins with a lost seat and ends with a false fire alarm. Its central idea is that hatred, when thorough enough, turns funny, and that the speaker's pleasure in complaining may be the real subject.
The list climbs in three steps. The first four lines stay in the building: the wrong program, three dead bulbs, "a wad of hardened gum," popcorn that is "cold and greasy." These irritations are small, sticky and physical, and not one concerns music. The second group moves to the stage, and the complaints turn both more expert and more ridiculous. The speaker knows that the guitar's D string is the one out of tune, that the timpanist is counting half-beats, that the pianist overused the sostenuto pedal. Yet beside this precision sit grievances like "Too many violins, not enough French horns" and a conductor in purple, "wrong for the season." Her standards are part professional and part tantrum, and the poem enjoys the mixture.
The ensemble itself is impossible. Bagpipes, a hurdy-gurdy, an electric guitar, a harp and a tenor all share one evening. Judging by this, the concert is less a record of a real night than a catalogue of everything that could go wrong, assembled by a mind in a foul mood. The details are chosen for their unpleasantness: "audible spit," a drooling husband, a snuffling man. The invented tempo markings add to the joke. "Allegro amoroso" promises something lively and loving, and the flautist's trousers fall down. "Andante pessimisto" sounds like the speaker's own mood leaking into the program's Italian.
The tone depends on deadpan. "Lost luggage is not an excuse" is a perfect line: nobody has offered the harpist's defence, so the speaker invents it in order to reject it, acting as prosecutor and judge at once. The flat statements pile up in short, end-stopped sentences with no rhyme and no regular meter, so the rhythm resembles a ledger. Even "The bagpipes were flat" seems to describe the poem's own manner. Because nothing is dressed up, the absurdities land harder. The long, tangled first line, where the usher "could not find our seats, or even our row," shows the style at its best, since the sentence wanders exactly as the audience does.
The final lines break the pattern. After a long run of observing, the speaker acts. She yells "Fire!", the only moment of direct speech that is hers, and the orchestra cheers and leaves the pit. For a second the critic and the performers are allies, all desperate to get out. The poem doesn't linger on that unity. It closes on the conductor, alone and "swinging his purple baton." Purple, first a complaint about clothing, now follows him into the final image, as though the speaker cannot let go of it even at the end. He has also been the one pleased by the evening, smiling and bowing at an audience that applauded after every movement. The people who enjoy the concert are, in her eyes, as much at fault as the people who spoil it.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it handles its narrator. We are never told why she hated the concert, only shown what she noticed, and the evidence is so uneven that we start to wonder whether the evening was bad or she was determined to find it so. Her husband, asleep and dribbling on his tie, is the only person who seems at peace. The poem is a comedy of attention: it shows how a sour mood can turn a whole night into a case file, and how entertaining that case file can be for everyone but the person who wrote it.