LYSANDER     Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,

War, death or sickness did lay siege to it,

Making it momentary as a sound,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,

Brief as the lightning in the collied night

That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,

And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold’,

The jaws of darkness do devour it up:

So quick bright things come to confusion.  (1.1.141-149)

Lysander could continue the slightly saccharine (but apparently heartfelt) exchange with Hermia, but he swerves into something darker and more complex, more in its expression than its sentiment. It’s a swerve into Romeo and Juliet, written at pretty much the same time, and one of the plays’ many points of contact with each other, at the level of language and conceit as well as plot. Or, if there were a sympathy in choice—even if you get to marry the person you love—war, death or sickness did lay siege to it. Nothing’s certain; you’ve found the love of your life and then they die (or you do, or both). That thing which seems so solid, secure, safe, is now under attack, and so making it—that love—momentary as a sound, swift as a shadow, short as any dream, fleeting, fleeting, something glimpsed only to disappear (and music, shadows, dreams will characterise this play) and brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, the lightning flash in the coal-black night, as if in a moment of fiery rage illuminating the whole world, land and sky—and ere a man hath power to say ‘behold’, the jaws of darkness do devour it up. Gone, and all dark again, before there’s even time to say, look! look at that! And the jaws of darkness are not just night but death, the earth, a grave.

But it’s the final line that is, perhaps, most extraordinary: so quick bright things come to confusion. Quick is living, as well as lively, and bright is gloriously non-specific, but it suggests youth and beauty, golden lads and girls, a loveliness that cannot last. Confusion is destruction (but confusion as such puts down a marker for this play too). And it’s all underlined by that delicate near-assonance of the monosyllables as the vowels shift from short to long and back again, before disappearing into the line’s only polysyllabic word, which might, here, have four syllables, con-fu-si-on, or else leave the line slightly short, a palpable gap, a loss. Lysander’s a bit of an idiot, but here…