JULIET                        Come, night, come, Romeo, come, thou day in night,

                        For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

                        Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back. (3.2.17-19)

This is where the speech turns in its conceits, and gets even better. But first, night has wings– and we fleetingly picture again not just the flying horses, but the trailing canopy of cloudy night that they have drawn, and the wing-like mantle. Those wings, that mantle, are also protective: in Matthew 23 Christ says ‘I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings’. The Virgin Mary as Mater Misericordiae, Mother of Mercy, shelters her devotees under her outspread cloak; she is addressed as such in the Salve Regina, Hail Holy Queen, the final hymn in the old service of Compline, the last office of the day. Not getting into the Catholic Shakespeare thing here, or even pausing to wonder about devotion to the Mater Misericordiae in pre-Reformation England, as it’s primarily an Italian devotion. But, just saying that there might be a mantle-wing-bird thing running through this in more ways than are immediately apparent.

Light has vanished into darkness, the sun has set, the bed-curtains are drawn, and all is deep, velvety, intimate blackness. And then there is light. Romeo is day in night: Juliet is here recalling and reanimating Romeo’s earlier conceit of her teaching the torches to burn bright, of the pearl in the Ethiop’s ear. Because what makes light is darkness, and what makes darkness is light; it’s all about the contrast. Just like Juliet at the window, the light breaking in the dawn, Romeo is the day, the sun. And the same delicate tactility of the pearl, the cheek is here in the imagining of a snowflake on soft feathers, fragile, ephemeral (notice that the words snowflake and feathers remain implicit: we have to imagine and supply them; they are so delicate, so transient). The snow will vanish, like the lightning, so hold your breath as you look at its perfect crystalline sparkle. The feathers are sooty soft; they can be touched and stroked, even as the snowflake cannot. Night flies, and Romeo will fly with it, to Juliet’s arms, whiter than the whitest thing, but we also hear lighter, and snow lies lightly as well as white. The Nurse and Mercutio refer to women as bearing the weight or the burden of men, but Juliet imagines Romeo as defying gravity. Love, like night, has wings. Love takes flight.