Rejection doesn't usually make anyone feel good about their work. When you live the academic life, you either learn to slough it off into a corner of your memory reserved especially for it, or you cease and desist all forms of publication and, as such, cease. I, of course, chose the former a long time ago.
We can liken the rejection of an article or similar work to that of a sort of "amor não correspondido", the kind we find all the way back to poems such as this Cantiga de Amor attributed to D Dinis:

Proenças soen mui bem trobar
E dizem eles que é con amor
Mas os que trobam no tempo da flor
E não em outro, sei eu bem que non
an tan gran coita no seu coraçon
Qual m'eu por mia senhora vejo levar.

It seems that my manuscript, for all its efforts and "trobar", has not won the heart of sua senhora this evening.

Yet, despite the initial disappointment, this one was a particularly poignant rejection which, surprisingly, left me with a rather positive feeling. I had been waiting for word on an article manuscript of just over 10,000 words (yes, that long) which will also serve as the center for a book project I am currently writing (and for which a publishing house had invited my submission - I am still waiting to hear of its fate). The article was missing various elements of the overall study which I have already incorporated into the book project, along with other corrections I caught only once I had begun fleshing out the various chapters. The comments that the readers gave indicated the following:

1) the background needed more detail and examples;
2) the study of individual poems needed better contextualization; and
3) there were some blatant errors in phraseology.

All of this gets cleared up in the book. On top of that, in order to make the corrections in the article I would need to add another 2000 words or so. Since I know no one who would accept, much less read, a 12,000 word article, I came to the realization that, while my work may not have found love with this senhora, she really wasn't meant to give levar o seu coitado coração anyway.

I sent off another article this morning to a different journal. Let's hope this one is waiting only for its besito de bienvenida (I wrote it in Spanish).

Buenas noches / boa noite / good night!