JULIET Come, gentle night, come, loving black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun. (3.2.20-25)
One of the other ways in which this passage recalls the pearl, the cheek, is in its playing with scale. We’ve had the cosmic stuff, the world shrunk to a room, a bed; night imagined as the sober-suited matron still seems statuesque, grand, if darkness is a mantle that covers the sky as well as the lovers. But the raven and the snow, as well as being vivid and tactile, are also small and close-to (when birds are imagined in this play they are often imagined as being held in or on the hand, delicate, trembling, a beating heart). So the invocation to night here is also more human: gentle night, black-browed night (night has a face; it’s close enough to trace the arches of her brows). Juliet’s gathered her thoughts in close, drawing the heavens towards her as bird, as snow, as friendly companion; it’s as if she’s hugging herself. And so: give me my Romeo. Mine – not Montague, not Capulet – all mine, all I want, all I need.
Then the speech turns again (famous bit gulp) and where to begin with the wonderfulness of where it ends up? One of the things that I think makes this so effective is that Juliet is delighted by her own wit and imagination as much as she is delighted by Romeo; she knows that the conceit is audacious, even outrageous. The little stars, shining on the face of heaven, are an eternal version of that momentary snowflake; they’re one of the places that all the light-in-darkness imagery has been heading. (Sonnet 65 concludes: that in black ink my love may still shine bright. Black and white are very often, at some level, about poetry and writing, the things which – as the Sonnets tell us – make love and beauty last.) I want her to throw her arms up in joy at this moment, as if she’s throwing caution to the wind and those little stars to the heavens, in the best glitter-bomb ever. And this first, long movement of the speech comes back to the sun, except now Romeo, and their love for each other, is more vital, more beautiful than the sun itself, and the starry night, that place of safety, privacy, and love, will be all that matters. (It’s very, very Donne. Or Donne is very, very Juliet.) Yes, we can talk about whether it’s die in a sexual sense, and whether it’s Juliet dying or Romeo dying (as in Q4) – but even without a potentially orgasmic quibble, it’s still about taking flight, and being in love with Romeo, night, love, and words. Making love, making poetry, and enjambed ecstasy.
