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.
Act II, Scene 2 · Macbeth
Context
Macbeth stares at his bloody hands and asks whether even the ocean could wash them clean. He answers his own question: his hand would instead turn the entire ocean red with blood.
Analysis
The hyperbole of staining the entire ocean red inverts the expected scale—instead of a vast sea cleaning a small hand, the hand contaminates infinite water. Shakespeare uses the Latinate word "incarnadine" (which simply means "make red") surrounded by simple Anglo-Saxon words, forcing the audience to hear the grotesque grandeur of Macbeth's guilt; it is so immense it requires a rare, almost liturgical term to name what it does.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Shakespeare uses scale inversion to dramatize how guilt warps perception—Macbeth's belief that his hand can pollute the ocean shows he now sees himself as cosmically polluted, a shift from viewing the murder as a political act to experiencing it as a metaphysical contamination that cannot be contained.