JULIET                        It is the lark that sings so out of tune,

                        Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.

                        Some say the lark makes sweet division:

                        This doth not so, for she divideth us.

                        Some say the lark and loathèd toad changed eyes;

                        O now I would they had changed voices too,

                        Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray,

                        Hunting thee hence with hunt’s-up to the day.

                        O now be gone, more light and light it grows.

ROMEO           More light and light, more dark and dark our woes! (3.5.27-36)

There’s a desperation to Juliet’s rhetoric here, unsurprisingly, the vivid, extravagant pictures that have earlier enriched her speech (the nightingale singing on the pomegranate tree, the meteor as torchbearer) giving way to hearsay and commonplace: Some say, Some say. The parallel construction is flat in comparison with the lyrical counterpoint of the lovers’ duet, which soared and sang as if they were chasing, throwing and catching, fugal subjects, theme and variations. Now the musical metaphor destroys itself: the lark sounds out of tune, shrill, ugly, the bird’s divisions (its showy trills and melismas) no longer sweet, because they truly divide. (Here again birdsong is a weapon, dividing – severing, as the sunbeams have the clouds– as well as piercing and beating.) There was apparently a belief that the lark used to have beautiful eyes and the toad appropriately ugly ones, but they swapped; one doesn’t need to know that, I think, to feel the intrusion of the toad, which is earthbound, clammy, ill-omened. (Like the earlier possible owl.) But the point is also that the lark’s song remains utterly beautiful, as it is in Sonnet 29, in the glorious moment when the speaker’s soul takes flight and sings at the mere memory of the beloved. But it cannot be heard as beautiful, not in these circumstances, by Romeo and Juliet.

And as well as heralding parting, the lark has also become the hunt’s-up: this was the name given to the bawdy song sung outside the bedchamber the morning after the wedding night, but here it is both ironic and quite literal: Romeo is a wanted man, and he will be hunted hence, pursued, to the death, if he remains where he is a moment longer. And with the repeated O now, O now, the moment of hiatus, of standing poised, tiptoe, on the threshold of the day, as if time itself might be stretched and redefined, as if time could stand still, on the balcony, together – that moment ends. Time is racing – more light and light it grows– and Romeo must delay no longer, must hurry away. Right now. A shared couplet to conclude, poignantly recapitulating one of the motifs that has marked the lovers’ discourse, light and dark, the dark standing for the other word which has been paired with light in the play: heavy, melancholy, earth-bound, sullen – not soaring with the lark in the dawn.

If these blog posts are getting longer it may be because their writer is also trying to spin out these last desperate moments….