Macbeth
Prompt #27 · Macbeth
Prompt Type: Theme + Device
Shakespeare uses metaphors of planting, growth, and harvest throughout Macbeth to describe political ambition and its consequences. Analyze how this extended metaphor reinforces the theme that violence and illegitimate power produce only destruction, not flourishing. Explain how it contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Quote 1
“I have liv’d long enough: my way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf; / And that which should accompany old age, / As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have; but, in their stead, / Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, / Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.”
Act V, Scene 3
Argument
The metaphor of Macbeth's life falling 'into the sere, the yellow leaf' uses agricultural imagery of withering and barrenness to demonstrate how his violent ambition has produced only sterility instead of the natural harvest of 'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' that legitimate power would yield.
Quote 2
“For Banquo’s issue have I fil’d my mind; / For them the gracious Duncan have I murder’d; / Put rancours in the vessel of my peace / Only for them; and mine eternal jewel / Given to the common enemy of man, / To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!”
Act III, Scene 1
Argument
The extended metaphor of 'the seed of Banquo kings' contrasts the fruitful, generative power of legitimate succession with Macbeth's barren violence; despite 'filing' his mind and murdering Duncan, his illegitimate reign produces no harvest, only the bitter realization that he has planted for others.
Quote 3
Act IV, Scene 3
Argument
The metaphor of 'good men's lives / Expire before the flowers in their caps' inverts natural growth cycles, showing how Macbeth's tyranny causes premature death rather than allowing lives to flourish to their natural completion, reinforcing that violence destroys rather than cultivates.
Quote 4
“Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown, / And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, / Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand, / No son of mine succeeding.”
Act III, Scene 1
Argument
The metaphor of the 'fruitless crown' and 'barren sceptre' explicitly uses agricultural imagery to demonstrate how Macbeth's violent usurpation has produced sterility rather than generative succession, reinforcing that illegitimate power cannot yield the natural harvest of dynastic continuity.
Quote 5
“Alas, poor country, / Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot / Be call’d our mother, but our grave,”
Act IV, Scene 3
Argument
The metaphor transforms Scotland from 'mother' to 'grave,' inverting the natural cycle of nurturing and growth into death and burial, demonstrating how Macbeth's tyranny has poisoned the land itself, making it incapable of sustaining life or producing flourishing.