Most of us, Thomas McAfee begins, spend our lives in small and slightly shabby appetites. "The Unhappy Few" divides humanity into two groups, and the poem's quiet shock is that it doesn't hand the sympathy to the group we'd expect. The majority complain about "bad coffee and too wet / Martinis"; the minority suffer in earnest and say nothing. The central idea is that real misery is not loud. The people who talk most about unhappiness are rarely the ones who know it.
The first stanza is brisk, sardonic, and a little self-implicating. "Most of us" is a pronoun that pulls the reader inside the crowd before the poem has decided whether to judge it. The opening image, "Climbing in and out of wombs," is startling and deliberately crude: life as a repeated return to comfort and shelter, an infantile loop of seeking and retreating. It sits oddly beside the complaint about martinis, and that is the point. Grand biological imagery is attached to trivial grievances, so that human appetite looks both primal and petty. The line "lust for, more than love" does similar work: the verb "lust" is physical and hungry, while "love" is demoted to second place, and the list that follows (wives, waitresses, "celluloid sirens") slides from the real to the merely projected. Even desire here is half secondhand, something watched on a screen. "Bitching" is a telling word too. It is slangy and faintly contemptuous, and the speaker uses it twice, once for the many and once, negated, for the few.
With "But" the poem turns. The second stanza names "the total horror / Of ennui," and the gap between those two words carries real weight. "Horror" is violent and visceral; "ennui" is a polite, borrowed, almost fashionable French term for boredom. Placing them together suggests that what looks like mere weariness is in fact something terrifying, and that the elegant vocabulary of dullness conceals an abyss. The imagery of the stanza is domestic and bleak: waking "tired at morning," preferring "another alley" to "another hour with the sheets." The alley is a striking choice. It is a place of danger and dirt, yet the sufferer would rather face it than lie in bed with his own mind. The bed, which the first stanza treated as a place of comfort and desire, becomes a site of siege, where "nightmares... gang up" like a mob. That verb gives the dreams intent and menace, as if despair were organised and outnumbered you.
The third stanza makes the poem's boldest claim: "Those few are real and positive." The word "positive" is unexpected, and it is worth pausing over. It isn't cheerful; it seems to mean certain, undeniable, the opposite of the posturing in stanza one. These people "know / What misery and terror really are," and their authority comes from their silence. They are "the very last ones to bitch." The final lines move quietly toward catastrophe. They "go off somewhere to drink in a bar / Or cry or quietly to kill themselves." The list is the most important structural trick in the poem. Drinking, crying and suicide are strung together with the same flat "or," as if they were interchangeable options for an evening. The adverb "quietly" is the last word of weight, and it echoes the poem's whole argument: suffering this deep makes no noise.
Formally the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme scheme, and the lines are uneven, closer to speech than song. That suits the voice, which is conversational and unvarnished, with casual phrases like "bitching" and "go off somewhere." The three stanzas of five lines each give a sense of order, but the enjambment, with sentences spilling across line breaks ("rather / Than to go on"), keeps the rhythm restless and prose-like. A tidier, rhymed poem would feel too consoling for this subject.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to dramatise. It doesn't describe despair in lyrical terms; it simply observes how rarely despair announces itself. Its moral is uncomfortable but useful: the loudest complaint is seldom the deepest pain, and the people we overlook may be the ones who most need us to look.