But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

The passage

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid since she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.
It is my lady. O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold. ’Tis not to me she speaks.

Romeo and Juliet · Act 2, Scene 2

In plain English

Wait, what is that light coming through the window over there? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun rising in it. Rise, lovely sun, and kill the jealous moon, who is already pale and ill with grief because you, her servant, are far more beautiful than she is. Do not serve her, since she is jealous. Her virgin’s uniform is a sickly green, and only fools wear it. Throw it off. It is my lady. It is my love. If only she knew that she is. She is saying something, yet not in words. No matter: her eyes are speaking, and I will answer them. No, I presume too much. She is not speaking to me.

Where it comes in the play

Earlier the same night, in Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), Romeo went to the Capulets’ feast to look at Rosaline and met Juliet instead. They spoke, kissed, and each then learned the other’s name. Romeo has not gone home. He has climbed into the Capulet orchard, and his friends, calling for him from the street, have just joked crudely about his love for Rosaline. His first line here answers them: He jests at scars that never felt a wound.

Then Juliet appears at a window above. She does not know he is there. She hears nothing Romeo says here, and when she speaks she believes she is alone. Juliet’s side of it is the subject of our essay on “What’s in a name?”.

Close reading

The interruption

soft is an interjection meaning “wait” or “hush”. Romeo is interrupting himself. The line is regular iambic pentameter, five unstressed-stressed pairs, and its stresses fall on the words that matter: soft, light, breaks. The verb is well chosen. Light breaks as day breaks, so the dawn of the next line is already present in the question.

Juliet is the sun

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun is a metaphor, not a simile. Romeo does not say she is like the sun. In the middle of the night he declares that it is morning, and reorganises the sky around a window.

The image belongs to a pattern. Romeo’s first words on seeing Juliet were O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! Throughout the play the lovers are light to each other against a dark background. The pattern later turns cruel. On the morning Romeo must leave for exile, real daylight is the enemy: More light and light, more dark and dark our woes.

Killing the moon

The conceit of the sun leads to one about the moon, and here a modern reader needs a gloss. The moon is Diana, goddess of chastity, and her maid is a virgin devoted to her. vestal livery is the uniform of virginity, sick and green because of the pallor then associated with unmarried girls. So when Romeo urges Juliet to Cast it off, he is hoping, in elaborate code, that she will not stay a virgin. The speech is adoring and also frankly desiring.

Rosaline, we were told in the first scene, had sworn to live chaste, and Romeo’s response was to moan in fashionable paradoxes: O brawling love, O loving hate. That was the manner of the Petrarchan lover, who suffers beautifully for a lady he cannot have (Orsino strikes the same pose in “If music be the food of love”). In asking the sun to kill the envious moon, Romeo is getting rid of Rosaline and her kind of love. Yet he does it in a Petrarchan conceit. His feelings have changed faster than his style.

The style breaks down

Then the style changes too. After eight lines of ornament comes It is my lady. O, it is my love!: short sentences, monosyllables, two exclamations. The next line, O, that she knew she were!, is only six syllables long. The pentameter is left unfinished, and the silence that fills the gap belongs to a man looking.

The lines after it are a small comedy of nerves. She speaks, yet she says nothing; I will answer it; I am too bold. Full stops fall in the middle of lines (caesura), and each statement corrects the one before. Romeo the poet has been replaced by a very young man who does not know whether to step forward. The speech is most convincing where it is least polished.

Stars, and a glove

The speech then climbs again. Two stars, away on business, have asked Juliet’s eyes to shine in their place. If the exchange were made, her eyes Would through the airy region stream so bright / That birds would sing and think it were not night. The couplet rhyme of bright and night seals the hyperbole, and it repeats the opening idea: Juliet turns night to day.

The last wish is the smallest. O, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek! From the sun and the stars Romeo comes down to a glove. Touch has mattered since the lovers’ first conversation, a shared sonnet about palms and pilgrims, and this line returns the speech from cosmic praise to physical nearness.

What it tells us about the play

The speech marks the difference between Romeo’s two loves. The feeling for Rosaline was all style and no object: she never appears. Here the conventional language is being pressed into service by a real person at a real window, and it keeps cracking under the pressure.

It also prepares a contrast with Juliet. Romeo’s instinct is for metaphor. Hers is for plain questions: how did he get in, does he love her, will he marry her. When he tries to swear by the moon, she stops him: O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon. The moon he wanted to kill she simply distrusts. And it is Juliet who sees the danger in the brightness. Their contract, she says, is Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be before it can be named. Lysander uses the same image of love in “The course of true love never did run smooth”, written at about the same time.

What people get wrong

soft does not describe the light. It means “hush”. Reading it as “what soft light” loses the drama of a man catching his breath.

There is no balcony. The scene is universally known as the balcony scene, but the word never appears in the play. Romeo speaks of a window, and Juliet simply appears above.

It is not a conversation. Romeo is not serenading Juliet. He is hidden, and she cannot hear a word. The speech is closer to a soliloquy.

It is not pure, simple romance. The moon passage is a wish that Juliet will give up her virginity, and the speech is partly a portrait of a young man in love with images.

Using it in an essay

The speech serves questions on love, on light and dark imagery, and on how Romeo changes. Examiners reward students who notice shifts within a speech, so write about the move from conceit to plain speech and back. The Romeo and Juliet quotation sheet gathers the light imagery in one place, and the lesson plans include a sequence on this scene.

Fragments worth memorising:

• Juliet is the sun - metaphor, not simile: she rearranges his universe.
• kill the envious moon - the rejection of Diana, chastity and, by implication, Rosaline.
• It is my lady. O, it is my love! - ornament gives way to plain monosyllables.
• O, that she knew she were! - a short line: the pause of a man looking.
• That birds would sing and think it were not night - hyperbole in which Juliet turns night to day.

The close reading toolkit gives a method for spotting shifts like these in any passage. For Shakespeare handling the same sun-and-beloved comparison in a sonnet, and doubting it, read our essay on “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”.

If you would like a daily prompt to keep reading, get Daily Bard for iPhone and iPad. It is free to download, and the app’s Catalogue, part of the Full Edition, lets you browse pages by play. Treat it as a companion to the text, not a replacement for it.