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.
Act II, Scene 3 · Macbeth
Context
Macbeth, explaining why he killed Duncan's guards in a supposed rage, describes the dead king's body in elaborate, aestheticized language, comparing his wounds to a breach in nature's walls.
Analysis
Describing Duncan's blood as 'golden' and his skin as 'silver' turns the corpse into a precious object, which is a bizarre aesthetic choice for someone supposedly overcome with grief. The phrase 'a breach in nature / For ruin's wasteful entrance' makes the murder sound like a cosmic event rather than something Macbeth himself did with a knife minutes ago. This ornate, distancing language reveals that Macbeth is narrating the scene rather than reacting to it—he has separated himself from the violence by wrapping it in metaphor, which positions us to see his explanation as a performance that has been over-thought.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Macbeth's most damning trait is his inability to stop aestheticizing his own crimes—this quote shows him turning Duncan's corpse into poetry, which exposes him as someone more concerned with how the murder looks and sounds than with the act itself, revealing guilt through over-performance.