“I do believe, induced by potent circumstances…”

The expression “I do believe, induced by potent circumstances / That thou art mine enemy” marks Frank’s first encounter with Shakespeare and shows how language can delight him before he fully understands it. Read aloud in the Fever Hospital, the unfamiliar line becomes a pleasure in its own right, while poetry more broadly gives Frank and Patricia a way to reach one another from separate rooms.

First Encounter with Shakespeare

While confined to the Fever Hospital, Frank reads a history book lent by Seamus. It surveys English kings, from King Alfred and William the Conqueror through Edward, and includes the first Shakespeare Frank has ever read. The excerpt is spoken by Catherine, one of Henry VIII’s wives, to Cardinal Wolsey, who is trying to have her beheaded.

Frank does not know what “induced” or “potent circumstances” means, and says he does not care: the passage is Shakespeare, and saying the words feels like having jewels in his mouth. He imagines that a whole book of Shakespeare could keep him in the hospital for a year. The line’s attraction therefore rests not on comprehension but on its sound and the pleasure of recitation.

Poetry Across the Wall

Patricia, in the next room, is unimpressed by Shakespeare and has her own poetry book. When she reads Frank a poem about an owl and a pussycat sailing in a green boat with honey and money, he says it makes no sense. Patricia takes offense and declares it the last poem she will read to him. Their disagreement echoes the gap between Frank’s delight in Shakespeare’s sound and Patricia’s attachment to her own poems: both can value poetry without agreeing on what makes it meaningful.

Seamus interrupts their quarrel to say they will have enough to fight about when they grow up and get married. Patricia apologizes, and Frank does too. She then reads part of another poem, “The Highwayman,” asking Frank to remember it so he can recite it back early in the morning or late at night, when no nuns or nurses are about. The exchange turns poetry into a private, reciprocal practice across the hospital wall.

Language Remembered and Reused

The Shakespeare passage is one part of a larger pattern in which Frank carries poems and stories into later moments. At home, after the last coal has been put on the fire, he tells his brothers invented adventures about obtaining lemonade and bread. He embellishes the account with imagined chases by pub owners and shopkeepers and an escape into St. Joseph’s Church, where, in his story, no one can pursue even a criminal who has killed his mother.

His brothers respond by placing the tale in the world of outlaw stories and ballads: Malachy likens him to Robin Hood, while Michael imagines him hanged in the People’s Park as outlaws are in films at the Lyric Cinema. Their conversation brings together storytelling, remembered popular culture, and the songs of Roddy McCorley and Kevin Barry. In that setting, Frank’s pleasure in memorable words at the hospital finds a later counterpart in the stories and songs his family makes around the fire.