Rolling Snake eyes April 24, 2013

 


Guilt, if her current poem can be believed, can be as complex as love, and clearly, she has moved beyond the point of redeeming lost love. She seems to fight back against the idea that she did anything wrong. She seems to blame the social rules, which deny her what she wants and needs.

She suggests that when it comes to love, there is injustice in denying her. She seems to be seeking a way to cope with the pain of her failed romance, and the poem takes the next step in a slow, downward trajectory.

This is a very bitter poem and seems determined to find something if not someone to blame for her misery.

To some degree, she blames herself for her forgetting what she has always needed to do to survive.

If she could get what she wanted in a world that is so compromised, she would feel better, some consolation for living in an otherwise unfair world.

Yet, she cannot get around the fact that the man she loves is already married, and this somehow puts her in the wrong for wanting him, and she can’t even forgive herself.

The poem raises the fundamental question: should love be bound by ordinary rules of morality?

Her answer is clearly no. Love should prevail over social standards.

She opens the poem with the concept that everything is turned upside down -- a new world order that destroys what should be positive feelings (about love) and has left her “frozen and dismayed” down deep.

The poem suggests that the whole love affair got exposed in a “scandalous way” and that he may have panicked when the secret came out. She indicates that her pain comes as a result of her forgetting “to obey the anti-rules of day-to-day existence.”

This in itself is a complex idea, implying that she should have been more careful, even less public, and treated the romance for what it was: a secret affair.

If she could have gotten what she wanted even in this  “up-ended down-righted way,” she might have been happy, suggesting perhaps she might have continued the affair, even though she clearly wanted much more.

It also suggests his panic and his desperation to save his marriage at any cost, a matter that frustrates her, and because of his marriage, she feels guilty when in reality in another world love might prevail, even in the face of public scandal.

The affair is clearly over. The wife apparently found out and has given him the ultimatum to choose which woman he will spend the rest of his life with, and he clearly chose the wrong way as far as our poet is concerned, although going back to the start of it all, she well-knew this affair would shatter his world if pursued.

She rolled the dice, hoping that when he was forced to choose, he would choose her over his wife.

She guessed wrong. She rolled snake eyes. Now she suffers the consequences.

 

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