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I think you need a
vacation from that.

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I always feel a little guilty
about reading a hard poem

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like that to an audience.

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And I have this
favorite thing when

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I have a bright eyed
academic audience.

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You can't to a
general audience who

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can't read a poem about
a Shakespearean play

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because they don't know
what you're talking about.

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But so I feel comfortable
about reading this.

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It goes back to a time when the
Old Vic repertory company came

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from England to Boston,
and they did a production

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of Romeo and Juliet.

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Because I thought it
would be instructive,

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I took our two daughters
who were then about I

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don't know 11 and
12 or 12 and 13

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to a Saturday matinee
performance which

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as you can probably
surmise was full of kids

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from local boarding schools and
so on eating popcorn and candy

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bars, and paying very
little attention to what

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was going on the stage.

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Except for me and I was so
carried away by the fifth act

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that I sobbed aloud, thereby
mortifying my daughters

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who couldn't wait
to get out of there.

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One of them said to me
it's only a play mother,

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and the other one
said I've never

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been so humiliated in my life.

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And so I was pretty
upset by that.

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And so as a kind of
exorcism, I wrote a poem

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about what would have happened
if Shakespeare had written

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Romeo and Juliet
as a comedy, that

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is to say with a happy
ending instead of the tragedy

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that we all know.

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And of course I wrote it
as a Shakespearean sonnet.

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And the one word I want to
gloss is the word rheum,

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which is R-H-E-U-M in this line,
and it's an old fashioned word

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for the cold catarrh.

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And it's called purgatory
because it struck me

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that the plot of
the poem was a kind

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of perfect image for a very
long term indeed, purgatory.

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And suppose the
darlings get to Mantua,

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suppose they cheat
the crypt, what next?

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Begin with him unshaven.

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Though not I grant you
a displeasing cockerel,

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there's egg yolk on his chin.

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His seedy robes a flap,
he's got the room.

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Poor dear, the cooking
lard has smoked her eye,

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another Montague is in the
womb although the first babe's

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bottoms not yet dry.

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She scrolls a weekly
letter to her nurse

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who dares to send a
smocked through Balthazar

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and once a month his
father posts a purse.

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News from Verona
always news of war.

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Such sour years it takes
to right this wrong.

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The fifth act runs
unconscionably long.

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