Macbeth
Scene #4 · Act II, Scene 1
After Banquo and Fleance exit, Macbeth sends his servant to bed and suddenly sees a dagger floating before him with its handle pointed toward his hand. He questions whether the vision is real or a hallucination from his troubled mind, noting that he can see but cannot grasp it. As he contemplates the dagger, it becomes covered with blood, and he recognizes it as a manifestation of the "bloody business" he is about to commit. When Lady Macbeth rings the bell to signal that all is ready, Macbeth declares "I go, and it is done" and exits toward Duncan's chamber, asking that Duncan not hear the bell that summons him to "heaven or to hell."
This hallucinatory moment reveals Macbeth's severe psychological turmoil and moral conflict as he stands on the threshold of regicide. The dagger symbolizes both his ambition pulling him forward and his conscience warning him against the murder, while the appearance of blood foreshadows the guilt and violence that will consume him after the deed. His final couplet transforms the bell from a domestic signal into a death knell, marking the irreversible moment when Macbeth crosses from contemplation into action.
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.
Act II, Scene 1 · Macbeth
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.
Act II, Scene 1 · Macbeth
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.—
Act II, Scene 1 · Macbeth
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?
Act II, Scene 1 · Macbeth