Is this | a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? |
Come let me clutch thee: | I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. |
Art thou not, | fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? |
Or art thou but | a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? |
I see thee yet, | in form as palpable as this which I now draw |
Thou marshall’st me | the way that I was going, and such an instrument I was to use. |
Mine eyes | are made the fools of the other senses, or else worth all the rest. |
I see thee still, | and on thy blade and dungeon gouts of blood, which was not so before. |
There’s no such thing: | It is the bloody business which informs thus to mine eyes. |
Now over the one half-world | nature seems dead, and wicked dream abuse the curtained sleep. |
Witchcraft celebrates | pale Hecate’s off’rings, |
and withered murder, | alarumed by his sentinel , the wolf, whose howl’s his watch, |
Thus with his stealthy | pace, with Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design, moves like a ghost. |
Thou sure and firm-set earth, hear not my steps, | which way they walk, for fear thy very stones prate of my whereabout, |
and take the present horror | from the time which now suits with it. |
Whiles I threat, he lives; | Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. |
a bell rings | I go and it is done. The bell invites me. |
Hear it not, Duncan, | for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell. |
rhyming | lives, gives |
foreshadowing | line 46, 63 |
DAGGER SPEECH -MACBETH
September 4, 2019