Rich’s early life was meticulously orchestrated by her father. Yet, her life changed course several times, and she ended up living a life very different from the one that had been planned for her. Using rhetorical questions, the speaker asks herself a difficult question that Rich must also have asked; was all that effort worth it? Has she built the life she really wanted, or has she built someone else’s vision of how her life should be?: ‘Was it worth while to lay—/ with infinite exertion—/ a roof I can’t live under?’ With thought-provoking clarity, the speaker declares that: ‘A life I didn’t choose/ chose me’. This startlingly honest line is one that many people can identify with. For example, a mid-life crisis can often be the result of a person reviewing their life and discovering that they have ended up in a very different place than they intended. Rich may be referring to being a poet. She did not choose to be a poet, but poetry chose her.
The speaker admits to feeling ill-equipped for a life that she never chose: ‘even/ my tools are the wrong ones/ for what I have to do’. She uses the adjective ‘naked’, with its connotations of vulnerability, and enhances its impact by combining it with another potent adjective, ‘ignorant’: ‘I’m naked, ignorant,/ a naked man fleeing/ across the roofs’. The speaker realises what a thin line there can sometimes be between two very different lives. Empathy is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, and feeling what it might be like to live another person’s life. The speaker feels as if she is the roofwalker, and she realises that he might also feel as if he could be her: ‘who could with a shade of difference/ be sitting in the lamplight/ against the cream wallpaper/ reading—not with indifference—/ about a naked man/ fleeing across the roofs’. Of the two subjects in the poem, one is sitting reading in their living room, the other is precariously balancing on a high roof. Yet, the woman in the living room identifies with the roofwalker’s vulnerability and is not indifferent to the difficulties of his existence.
