Macbeth Quote Analysis

As Lady Macbeth ends her sleepwalking episode, she speaks this line before repeatedly urging someone (presumably Macbeth) to come to bed.

The perfect syntactic parallelism—'done' mirrored by 'undone,' 'cannot' locking both halves—creates a sentence that performs its own meaning: it is as sealed and irreversible as the truth it states. This balanced structure gives the line a proverbial, universal quality, lifting it beyond her individual situation. Where she once spoke in commands and persuasions, she now speaks in resigned axioms.

Use this to argue that Lady Macbeth's arc moves from trying to control fate through willpower and deception to accepting fate's irreversibility—the shift from active manipulation to passive acceptance is encoded in her move from imperative verbs earlier to this flat, declarative fatalism.