The Deeper Read 18

Eve Ellis

“Speaking of Shakespeare’s Juliet, and the Women of My Family” from Spit Valve, published by Ignition Press.

Spit Valve is shortlisted for the 2025/26 Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets.

Free tickets for the Awards reading at 6.30pm on Tuesday 9 June at the Pavilion Theatre, British Library, London, can be booked here.

Speaking of Shakespeare’s Juliet, and the Women of My Family

Say you pull that dagger out of your stomach.
Let the glass bottle drop from your fist.
Say your hands unbutton, lift those funeral clothes.

Stains can evaporate off bedsheets like cumulus clouds.
Say you buck the boy’s shadow right off you,
watch him back out of the room.

Say you’re alive in your party dress, thirteen again, tripping
backwards up a flight of stone steps into
a loose dressing gown, midmorning, the light

yellow, acidic. Say your father is careful, your mother’s
always home. The sun is not a lemon waiting for the knife.
Say, by the window, your book lies open.

Eve Ellis

A long poem title has a narrative completeness about it that makes it a poem in its own right, and at seventeen syllables, Eve Ellis’s title could be a haiku. It subtly introduces the main metaphor – the tragic heroine – whilst tethering it in reality: the lived experience of the speaker’s own female relatives. One is known, the other unknown, hinted at in the title but nowhere else. Lurking behind both are misogyny and violence against women; a “shadow” the poem seeks to throw off.

At twelve lines, this is no sonnet love poem, but rather a consideration of what alternative story might unfold if the patriarchal heteronormative narrative is rejected. The tone appears conversational, with the anaphora of “Say” threading through the poem. It quickly becomes clear, however, that this refrain is an imperative, a call to arms, always appearing at the start of a sentence. The first stanza consists of three instructions, every line a complete end-stopped sentence, making us pause to consider the implications of each:

Say you pull that dagger out of your stomach.
Let the glass bottle drop from your fist.
Say your hands unbutton, lift those funeral clothes.
(1-3)

What is Juliet famous for? For being the object of Romeo’s love, the unwilling pawn of her family’s feud, and for dying because of both. But what if she were allowed to be herself? The speaker addresses both us and her, and the boldness of the first line in rejecting her fate makes us breathless even as it imagines Juliet’s breath returning. It’s as if a firm but loving parent – exactly what Juliet needed but lacked – is telling her what to do: not pull herself together, but “pull that dagger out of your stomach”. No need to die because of a guy, no need to personify yourself as the passive recipient of either fate or phallus; Ellis flipping round the character’s dying cry of “O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath!” (5.3.168-9) in her re-imagining.

Shakespeare doesn’t mention where Juliet stabs herself, but Ellis’s work is viscerally rooted in the body, and we wince to imagine it sliding out of the girl’s abdomen. The first line ends with “stomach”, the second with “fist”; the former passive but the latter active, able to clench now it has “Let the glass bottle” of poison “drop”, and we remember that Juliet makes three attempts to kill herself: by draining the dregs of Romeo’s poison; by kissing his lips in case some poison is still on them; and finally by stabbing herself with his dagger. It’s Genesis 3:16 all over again; the woman punished more than the man for the same mistake.

Having expelled the dagger and discarded the poison, Juliet’s hands are now free to “unbutton, lift those funeral clothes” (3). Ellis plays expertly with cognitive dissonance here, juxtaposing the titillation of undressing with the relief inherent in the verb “lift”. A woman disrobing is always framed as a spectacle – and the third stanza will queasily remind us that Juliet is only thirteen when she is effectively pimped out at her parents’ party – but here she is freeing herself from both heavy ceremonial clothes and the obligations inherent in them. Committed a sin as a woman, especially a sexual one? Better die. Disobeyed your parents and society? Better die. Love life gone wrong? Better die. Or instead, reverse the trajectory that brought you here: the verb “unbutton” cleverly doubling as a rewind switch.

In the second stanza, the well-known story starts to spool backwards in Ellis’s deft un-telling:

Stains can evaporate off bedsheets like cumulus clouds.
Say you buck the boy’s shadow right off you,
watch him back out of the room.
(4-6)

As with the first three lines, the fourth line is an end-stopped sentence; not an imperative this time, but a statement of fact, confidently stating the new physics of this imagined mirror world. The verb “evaporate” harks back to “lift” and chimes with the image of the “cumulus clouds” (4). In this short poem, words work hard: “Stains” is a concrete noun, referring to the detritus of sex, but is also a metaphor with its biblical implications of sin and shame. “His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,” says the Nineteenth Century hymn (Grant); but these storm clouds can dissipate, and the following two lines, the first to share one sentence, suggest how: “Say you buck the boy’s shadow right off you, / watch him back out of the room.” (5-6). These are still parsing lines (Longenbach 69), giving clear instructions, but as Juliet sheds more and more, the poem’s pace begins to pick up.

The disgust inherent in the punning “cumulus clouds” of bodily fluids finds physical expression in the sharp monosyllabic verbs “buck” and “back”, bristling with explosive consonants, and in the phrase “right off you”. Did Juliet really want to have sex with Romeo? Or was it simply the done thing to reciprocate male interest, or a way of trying to gain some control: if you’re going to be married off anyway, might as well choose your own man quickly? In a satire on female anonymity, Romeo is not even named; he is merely ‘the boy’, sheepishly creeping away in a parody of lackies shuffling from a noble on whom they are not permitted to turn their backs.

At the midpoint of the poem, Juliet is revived, freed of both death and expectations, and every line in the third stanza enjambs to embody this sudden ease as the rewinding of the tragedy continues, spilling into the first line of the final stanza:

Say you’re alive in your party dress, thirteen again, tripping
backwards up a flight of stone steps into
a loose dressing gown, midmorning, the light

yellow, acidic.
(7-10)

The longest line in the poem is full of joy: “alive”, “thirteen again”, “tripping”. There is so much in Shakespeare’s play that ‘trips’ up poor innocent Juliet, and Ellis’s use of the verb in the sense of stepping lightly throws this into relief. The stairs may be hard “stone”, but Juliet doesn’t trip over them; instead she gracefully retreats to the peace of her room. A “party dress” may sound fun, but this too carries a performative weight; better to flow back “into / a loose dressing gown”, liberated from restraint of any kind.

As Juliet relaxes into the “midmorning” of her young life, the metaphor makes us acutely aware that this life is now full of possibility. The narrative unspooling halts at the beginning of the final stanza with the striking imagery of “the light / yellow, acidic.” (9-10). The play ends in the triple occlusion of deception, night and a tomb, but here we are in daylight: nothing to hide, nothing to hide from. There is something almost cleansing about “acidic” here, coupled with the reclaiming of a word often used pejoratively against a woman deemed to be sharp-tongued for speaking plainly. Ellis doesn’t need to write ‘say you speak your mind, say you tell him ‘no’’; it is implicit.

The next supposition, however, places blame clearly on the Capulet parents and the system they embody: “Say your father is careful, your mother’s / always home.” (10-11) The line break between ‘mother’ and ‘home’ is brutal. In the play, Lady Capulet is a distant aristocratic mother, leaving her daughter solely in the charge of her Nurse; to be fair to her, she also went through the trauma of an early and doubtless arranged marriage, telling her daughter: “By my count / I was your mother much upon these years / That you are now a maid” (1.4.73-5). The patriarchy purports to be all about secure home-making, but in fact is anything but, and the break also signifies the poem’s hope that a rupture can be made between femininity and the strictures placed upon it. Capulet himself is the opposite of “careful”, naively allowing his enemy’s son to gatecrash his party in the midst of a bloody feud (1.5.63-87), heedless of the potential consequences.

As parents, they are caustically defined by what they are not, paving the way for the penultimate metaphor of the poem, also a negative: “The sun is not a lemon waiting for the knife.” (11). As with line 4, this is notable for being a statement rather than a command. The day will not be cut short by a party and an ill-advised coupling; Juliet’s life will not be cut short by the consequences of both. She is neither passive vessel for the phallic “knife” nor fruity fertility symbol, doomed to reproduce in the service of her family’s bloodline. Maybe, like the “yellow acidic” morning light, she has her own sharpness.

Now we have rewound to before the giddy trajectory of tragedy, what might she – and the speaker’s womenfolk – do instead? The poem’s final line, one of the shortest, leaves us with an idea: “Say, by the window, your book lies open.” (12). Noun, noun, verb, all of them metaphors: exit, education, escape. In the words of Shania rather than Shakespeare: “Let’s go, girls”.

*******

Something I like to do when reading poems is to see what poem is created by the end words, a kind of golden shovel in reverse. Here’s the end word poem from this piece, with a line for each stanza, keeping each word’s original punctuation. The extraordinary tautness of this twelve-line poem – more economical than a sonnet, Shakespearian or otherwise – really comes out, as does Ellis’s expert control of pace through end-stopping and enjambment. Notice how the third stanza is really the volta of the poem, suddenly flowing freely as Juliet miraculously escapes her fate for an alternative future; the end words forming a joyful phrase in their own right: “tripping into light”.

stomach. fist. clothes.

clouds. you, room.

tripping into light

mother’s knife. open.

*******

Each week, I’ll share a poem of my own if I think I’ve one which chimes with the poem under discussion. Here’s “to regret nothing you have to know what you’ve missed”, which I wrote in response to Eve’s poem during a Poetry School MA workshop with Anthony Joseph on “Contagious Poetry”. It was Commended by Victoria Kennefick in the Verve Poetry Festival 2026 ‘Love’ competition and appears in Stitching a Net to Hold Joy, the Verve Book of Love Poetry, available here. You can hear me read it with other featured poets this Sunday 10 May on Zoom, 11am-12.30pm, tickets here.

to regret nothing you have to know what you've missed

imagine you understood something early
and never forgot it, imagine you let it live,
part of you, stubborn as a scar

imagine there was never any need
to tear at your skin – what are you trying
to let out – imagine not being hungry,

a black hole wrapped in flesh, eating
into existence, vomiting yourself
to vanish again, imagine what you’d do

with the energy spent being acceptable,
the sheer fission blast of it, imagine
if you’d kissed every one of those girls

Suzanna Fitzpatrick

Works Cited

Grant, Robert. “O worship the King all glorious above.” Hymnary.org, hymnary.org/text/o_worship_the_king_all_glorious_above. Accessed 7 May 2025.

Joseph, Anthony. “Contagious Poetry.” MA Summer School, 30 June 2025, The Poetry School, London. Workshop. Notes taken by me.

Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line, Graywolf Press, 2008.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, OUP, 1995, pp. 335-66.

The Holy Bible. New International Version, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990.

Twain, Shania. “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!”. YouTube, 9 October 2009, youtu.be/ZJL4UGSbeFg?si=ndh3NHhhHHsTLEuL. Accessed 7 May 2025.