The poet’s expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.

Jacob suggests that poetic “joy” is often a crafted surface rather than a transparent record of lived happiness. The poet’s exuberant language can function as a mask, compensating for an inner lack: the very intensity of celebration may betray a hunger for what is being praised. The line also implies a modernist suspicion of sincerity—art does not simply transmit feeling but transforms it, sometimes into its opposite. In this view, poetry becomes a strategy for surviving disappointment: by inventing joy in words, the poet both hides and reveals despair, turning absence (not having found joy in reality) into aesthetic presence.