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Unread 07-18-2013, 08:53 AM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: New York
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I think this ends very strongly. I like the "surprise" in the last line. But the octet strikes me as not spot-on enough in its knowing description of the typical film plot. I get the sense that it's meant to delight us with its insightful analysis of such plots, and we are supposed to be nodding our heads in recognition, but for me it comes off a bit flat and I don't actually think the octet provides a very interesting distillation of any particular movie genre (and certainly not film noir). I'd prefer the octet to skip the part about "movies" and "script" and simply describe a particular plot of a particular movie (which needn't, of course, be a real movie). There's too much throat-clearing in the opening, I think. And I'd get rid of the "perhaps" and just tell us what in fact happens in the film -- after all, the sestet doesn't say "perhaps" when we flash forward twenty years.

I just read Gail's comment and I must say that I hadn't understood that the "you" in L14 was her married lover. Gail is right, of course, but my take was that the speaker was a lonely man and "you" was not a particular person but a generalized luckier person who had managed to find himself a wife while our speaker never did. I do much prefer Gail's reading, so my suggestion would be to prepare the ground a bit more before the final couplet so that dense people like me can be better oriented.
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