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Explication Paper On Romeo and Juliet Juliet appears near the window where she pledged her love to Romeo. She knows that the Nurse is going to bring the "cords, " the rope steps, that she will let down so that Romeo may climb up. The sun is still up, but Juliet wants it to go down. She is waiting for the night and her Romeo to come. Her first words are "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, / Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner / As Phaethon would whip you to the west, / And bring in cloudy night immediately" (3. 2. 1 - 4). In Juliets imagination, night will bring the realization of her love.
She says, "Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, / That runaways' eyes may wink and Romeo / Leap to these arms, until'd of and unseen" (3. 2. 5 - 7). Juliet is seeing things as if she is laying on a bed, seeing the curtains close about her, bringing the dark and making love. Juliet is sure that when night and Romeo come, the love-making will be magical, because "Lovers can see to do their amorous rites / By their own beauties" (3. 2. 8 - 9). Even if Juliet is not able to see Romeo, she will accept it because "if love be blind, It best agrees with night" (3. 2. 9 - 10). One more time Juliet asks the night to come. This time she uses metaphors, which deepen her eroticism with a feel of the forbidden: "Come, civil night, / Thou sober-suited matron, all in black, / And learn me how to lose a winning match, / Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhood's" (3. 2. 10 - 13).
In the same manner, Juliet, can feel herself burning with desire, is asking the night to cover her so that her desire can be fulfilled. She says, "Hood my uncanny'd blood, bating in my cheeks, / With thy black mantle, till strange [bashful] love, grown bold, / Think true love acted simple modesty [chastity]" (3. 2. 14 - 16). The words "hood, "unmanned, " and "bating" are all borrowed from falconry. Yet again she asks night to come to her, and she asks Romeo to come with it: "come, Romeo, come, thou day in night; / For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night / Whiter than new snow on a raven's back" (3. 2. 17 - 19). This beautiful metaphor contrasts Romeo's shining whiteness and the deep black of the night, and the same contrast is repeated in the climax of Juliet's reverie: Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. (3. 2. 21 - 25) Later, Juliet starts to be more realistic. She protests that although Romeo and her now belong to each other, they actually do not have each other: "O, I have bought the mansion of a love, / But not possess'd it, and, though I am sold, / Not yet enjoy'd" (3. 2. 26 - 28).
Juliet is complaining that this day is as boring to her as the new forbidden clothes to a child. Then the Nurse appears, carrying the rope ladder. Thus, as we approach the final unraveling of misapplied help and accidental and intentional destruction in the play, we hear Juliet refer to an elementary Olympian myth about time and the action of the sun. This was developed in Book One of Ovid Metamorphoses, in which Phoebus Apollo, who rides in the chariot of the sun to produce day, lends the reins to his beloved son, Phaeton. This is marvelously thrilling poetry inspired by love.
But in her extraordinary rush to bring in night - night in bed with Romeo, of course - Juliet refers to a tragedy other than her own impending one. In Ovid's tragedy Phaeton asked for an incontrovertible promise from his father, Apollo, to help prove to his peers his half-divine origins. In essence, he asked to borrow his father's car. Like any father, with great reservations Apollo allowed him.
Driving out of control, Phaeton created havoc in the heavens and earth and helped bring on his own untimely death by a thunderbolt from the king of heaven, Jupiter. Phaeton had been overreaching and in excessive haste, almost by accident. He needed to prove to a friend that he was Apollo's son, and in the process he lost the reins to the chariot of the sun. He memorialized his uncontrolled rush by charring Mother Earth and thereby creating the Sahara Desert. Juliets sonnet-like soliloquy is about the end of day.
She begins with "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, / Towards Phoebus' lodging!" (3. 2. 1) when she wants to bring in her wedding night on the second evening of knowing Romeo. Juliet's "Gallop apace" is remarkable because it contains the promise of both is purely erotic, without trace of the mysticism in which sex is mere symbol. It is a parting of which it can be truly claimed that it is love which is "an interinanimation of two souls" because it is precisely not the "passion that wants darkness and triumphs in a transfiguring Death. " There is no naked sword between these lovers. Theirs is not a desire to die to the world but a most energetic desire to live in it, to survive crises. Coming back to the effects of love on the two main characters, the most dramatic change is in their command of language. Before she sees Romeo we hear Juliet making proper-young-lady noises like, "It is an honour that I dream not of" ("it" being her marriage to Paris).
After she sees Romeo, she's talking poetically. It appears that Juliet, for all her tender years and sheltered life, has had a considerably better education than simply a technical training to be a wife and mother. The point is that it would never have occurred to her to make use of her education in her speech in the way she does here without the stimulus of her love.
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Research essay sample on Fiery Footed Steeds Fiery Footed Steeds Towards Phoebus Night
