I think you need a vacation from that.
I always feel a little guilty about reading a hard poem
like that to an audience.
And I have this favorite thing when
I have a bright eyed academic audience.
You can't to a general audience who
can't read a poem about a Shakespearean play
because they don't know what you're talking about.
But so I feel comfortable about reading this.
It goes back to a time when the Old Vic repertory company came
from England to Boston, and they did a production
of Romeo and Juliet.
Because I thought it would be instructive,
I took our two daughters who were then about I
don't know 11 and 12 or 12 and 13
to a Saturday matinee performance which
as you can probably surmise was full of kids
from local boarding schools and so on eating popcorn and candy
bars, and paying very little attention to what
was going on the stage.
Except for me and I was so carried away by the fifth act
that I sobbed aloud, thereby mortifying my daughters
who couldn't wait to get out of there.
One of them said to me it's only a play mother,
and the other one said I've never
been so humiliated in my life.
And so I was pretty upset by that.
And so as a kind of exorcism, I wrote a poem
about what would have happened if Shakespeare had written
Romeo and Juliet as a comedy, that
is to say with a happy ending instead of the tragedy
that we all know.
And of course I wrote it as a Shakespearean sonnet.
And the one word I want to gloss is the word rheum,
which is R-H-E-U-M in this line, and it's an old fashioned word
for the cold catarrh.
And it's called purgatory because it struck me
that the plot of the poem was a kind
of perfect image for a very long term indeed, purgatory.
And suppose the darlings get to Mantua,
suppose they cheat the crypt, what next?
Begin with him unshaven.
Though not I grant you a displeasing cockerel,
there's egg yolk on his chin.
His seedy robes a flap, he's got the room.
Poor dear, the cooking lard has smoked her eye,
another Montague is in the womb although the first babe's
bottoms not yet dry.
She scrolls a weekly letter to her nurse
who dares to send a smocked through Balthazar
and once a month his father posts a purse.
News from Verona always news of war.
Such sour years it takes to right this wrong.
The fifth act runs unconscionably long.