Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he 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.
– William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 2. In a soliloquy full of passion Juliet addresses the night, personifying it as "gentle" and "loving." She urges it to "come" so that she can be with Romeo under cloak of darkness. Their love is forbidden because of the feud between their families, so the night offers protection. Juliet’s strong desire and longing for her wedding night with Romeo is expressed here in explicitly sexual and violent terms. In the play love and sex are intertwined with violence and death and are never far apart. Juliet’s repetition of "come" makes clear the physical union she yearns for with Romeo. Using a metaphor, she imagines Romeo dying and being cut into little stars to light up the heavens in an ecstasy of love. This image describes the sexual fulfillment she longs for with the young husband she secretly married. In Shakespeare’s time, "die" was Elizabethan slang for sexual climax. The passage’s opposing symbolism of light and dark reminds us that the light of the couple’s love glows most brightly in the dark.