Now o’er the one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtain’d sleep. Witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecate’s off’rings; and wither’d murder, / Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, / Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, / With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design / Moves like a ghost.—

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?

List’ning their fear, I could not say “Amen,” / When they did say, “God bless us.”

If a man were porter of hell gate, he should have old turning the key.

The night has been unruly: where we lay, / Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say, / Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death, / And prophesying, with accents terrible, / Of dire combustion and confus’d events, / New hatch’d to the woeful time.

’Tis unnatural, / Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last, / A falcon, towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.

Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, / Threatens his bloody stage: by the clock ’tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.

Light thickens; and the crow / Makes wing to th’ rooky wood. / Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale!—

This is the very painting of your fear: / This is the air-drawn dagger which you said, / Led you to Duncan.