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-oppressed
brain?
I see thee yet, in form as
palpable
As this which now I
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 o' the other
senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee
still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of
blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such
thing:
It is the bloody business which
informs
Thus to mine eyes.
This is the text
of Macbeth's solo speech in act 2 scene 1, the speech that verbalises Macbeth's vision
of the air-drawn dagger. So far as poetic techniques are concerned, the entire speech is
an example of vision. It is a rhetorical device to explore
the imaginative vision of a personage when nothing really exists before the physical
eyes. The dagger that Macbeth sees here is but a visionary product of his over-heated
imagination. Another figurative technique used is called
apostrophe in which the speaker addresses someone dead or
absent, or a non-human object as if the person/object is present before the speaker.
Here Macbeth addresses a shadowy dagger and seems to look for its responses. On further
examination, you will find a number of questions asked by
Macbeth:
Is this a dagger which I
see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
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-oppressed brain?
This is yet
another poetic technique: use of rhetorical questions, called
interrogation. These questions contain answers implied in
the questions themselves.
Over and above, the entire speech
is in the form of a dramatic solo speech, called
soliloquy.
No comments:
Post a Comment