PROCTOR: You ought to bring some flowers in the house…It’s winter in here yet. On Sunday let you come with me, and we’ll walk the farm together; I never see such a load of flowers on the earth. Lilacs have a purple smell. Lilac is the smell of nightfall, I think. Massachusetts is a beauty in the spring!
ELIZABETH: Aye, it is.
There is a pause. She is watching him from the table as he stands there absorbing the night. It is as though she would speak but cannot. Instead, now, she takes up his plate and glass and fork and goes with them to the basin. Her back is turned to him. He turns to her and watches her. A sense of their separation, rises.
– Arthur Miller
The Crucible, Act 2. John Proctor, speaking to his wife Elizabeth, uses a series of metaphors to compare the colorless, winter-like atmosphere in his home to the abundance of spring flowers outside. Winter here is a metaphor for the chill in the Proctors’ marriage. It is obvious something is separating them, emotionally and physically. The metaphors of lilac offering the calm of nightfall and Massachusetts in spring compared to a beautiful woman are expressions of hope and also that something is not right in the Proctors’ world. As indeed it isn’t. For as well as the coolness between them, we know that the Devil is said to be loose in Salem and a witch hunt has begun.