Now you must live with this man
until one of you dies: you must sit opposite to him at meals, you
can not escape constant contact. Your only resource is profane
soliloquies: but if you have a sufficiently ugly disposition, you
can revenge yourself upon him in a thousand secret ways.
Friar Lawrence unconsciously and innocently fans the flames of
hatred in our speaker's heart, simply because he does not dream of
the effect he produces. Every time he talks at table about the
weather, the cork-crop, Latin names, and other trivialities, the man
sitting opposite to him would like to dash his plate in his face:
every time Friar Lawrence potters around among his roses, the other
looking down from his window, with a face distorted with hate, would
like to kill him with a glance. Poor Lawrence drives our soliloquist
mad with his deliberate table manners, with his deliberate method of
speech, with his care about his own goblet and spoon. And all the
time Lawrence believes that his enemy loves him!
From another point of view, this poem resembles _My Last Duchess_ in
that it is a revelation of the speaker's heart.
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