It's Act II Scene VI, and Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers, are finally to be married by Friar Lawrence in his cell. The good friar sees the forthcoming marriage as a golden opportunity to put an end to the seemingly never-ending war between the Montangues and the Capulets.
But more than anything else, this will be a love match, and the love between Romeo and Juliet has grown so much that neither is able to express it in words. Romeo tries his best, but can't, and so asks his bride to try and articulate how they both feel:
"Ah, Juliet, if the measure of thy joy
Be heaped like mine, and that thy skill be more
To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbor air, and let rich music’s tongue
Unfold the imagined happiness that both
Receive in either by this dear encounter."
But Juliet is no more equal to the challenge than Romeo:
"Conceit, more rich in matter than in words,
Brags of his substance, not of ornament.
They are but beggars that can count their worth.
But my true love is grown to such excess
I cannot sum up sum of half my wealth."
What she means is that the enormous love that Romeo and Juliet share is richer than any word could possibly suggest. One's true worth cannot be counted; anyone who claims to be able to do so is poor. Juliet's love for Romeo has made her so rich that she cannot even begin to count half the wealth such love has brought.
Friday, November 27, 2015
How much do the lovers say their love has grown?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
No comments:
Post a Comment