My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man / That function is smother’d in surmise, / And nothing is but what is not.

Stars, hide your fires! / Let not light see my black and deep desires. / The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be, / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry, “Hold, hold!”

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.

I go, and it is done. The bell invites me. / Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

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.

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep,”—the innocent sleep; / Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.

His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood; / And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature / For ruin’s wasteful entrance: there, the murderers, / Steep’d in the colours of their trade, their daggers / Unmannerly breech’d with gore.

Had I but died an hour before this chance, / I had liv’d a blessed time; for, from this instant / There’s nothing serious in mortality. / All is but toys: renown and grace is dead; / The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees / Is left this vault to brag of.