He presents neither a magical-seeming vaccine nor a tale of heroic caregivers saving lives. Instead, his verse describes how it feels to live inside an infected body, speaking the voice of illness, echoing with proximity to death. The results are haunting and beautiful, though their sing-song rhythm also appears deeply conventional. The poem was written in 1593, when an outbreak of bubonic plague closed London theaters in the 1590s. The refrain repeated at the end of each stanza: "Lord, have mercy on us!" captures the magnitude of the destruction and strikes the heart as much as it must have done more than 400 years ago.