Betrayal in "Roles Switched" doesn't only hurt the speaker. It reshuffles their whole inner cast. The poem is built from two eight-line halves that mirror and contradict each other. In the first, the feelings we normally prize (Courage, Composure, Love, Compassion) fall apart one by one. In the second, the feelings we usually try to shake off (Distrust, Fear, Jealousy, Gloom) turn out to have been quietly looking after the speaker. The title announces the swap, and the sixteen lines set out to prove it.
The opening half is almost entirely physical. We get "shaky legs and trembling hands," "uneven breaths and bloodshot eyes," so panic is felt in the body before it is named. "Cowed is how my Courage stands" puts the broken word first, so the line itself seems to bow. The capital letters turn abstract nouns into characters, and the repeated hard *c* of Courage, Composure and Compassion links them as a family under attack. Love gets the saddest moment, mumbling "What am I to do?" like someone who has run out of plans. The half ends on its knottiest line: "With unveiled scorn dies my 'Compassion' meet." The quotation marks around "Compassion" are intriguing, as if the speaker no longer trusts the word. The syntax is tangled, but I read it as compassion turning to scorn for "those naïve enough to fall for lies," perhaps including the speaker's own earlier self. That is an inference, and the line leaves room for other readings.
Both halves rhyme in couplets (hands/stands, eyes/cries, deceit/meet), and the tidy sound is a little ironic when the content is falling apart. The form holds while the feelings don't. The rhythm is looser than the rhyme. The lines in the first half are short and breathless, while those in the second stretch into long, talky ones: "But he also protected me from those, he was sure, were upto no good." It's tempting to hear the speaker's breathing settle, since "uneven breaths" have given way to a voice with room to explain itself.
That second half is where the poem gets its charm. The feelings are still personified, but the tone shifts from alarm to grudging affection. Distrust is "a nuisance" who ruins moods yet guards the speaker, and the aside "he was sure" hints he may be overcautious. Fear is the only one called a friend, and the detail that he "held my hand" answers the "trembling hands" of the opening, so the shaking hands now have someone to hold them. Jealousy arrives as "'er," a slangy contraction that makes her sound like someone recently met rather than an old companion. Her effect is neatly packed into the repeated verb: "drive me mad, and drive me to do better." Pain becomes fuel. Gloom closes the poem with a wry "who else but Gloom," and his "staggering along" echoes the unsteady body of the first half. The stagger is now a companion's burden, and it is shared.
The final image is the poem's only real piece of nature: "how vibrantly the flowers did bloom." After a first half of bloodshot eyes and panic, the sudden colour is striking, and it is Gloom who earns it. The suggestion is that heaviness sharpens perception, so you notice brightness more once you have been in the dark.
The poem's significance lies in this reversal of the usual moral ranking of emotions. It doesn't say vices are good and virtues foolish. Courage stays cowed and Compassion stays dead, so the victory is partly a loss. What it says is that after betrayal, the "negative" feelings do practical work: they warn, protect, motivate and deepen. The poem never says who did the lying, which lets any reader bring their own disappointment to it. The loose punctuation ("upto," the missing space after "nuisance,") gives it the feel of thinking aloud rather than polishing, and that suits a poem about learning to live with the feelings you'd rather not have.