It is vital that you understand the meaning of each word in this soliloquy, and if you need any help defining any words, click on the below link.
Lady Macbeth's soliloquy reveals many traits of her character and her motives made apparent, which makes the storyline of the play more apparent and involves the audience and familiarizes them with Lady Macbeth.
In Shakespeare's time, as now, women were thought to be more naturally kind and much more gentle than men. But, Lady Macbeth, thinking deadly (stated as mortal) thoughts, calls in the 'spirits of murder' which will take away the womanly characteristics which is the part that stops her from killing and not care. Nowadays, we might show a woman talking to herself, saying 'you can do it', but can she? For a person wanting to be so very cold-hearted, she seems to talk quite a lot. She asks for her blood to be thick and her milk to be a bitter poison, but at the end she asks for the ability to kill without seeing what she is doing, and particularly not be seen.
She says, and I quote,
'Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry "Hold, hold!"
In an atmosphere of a black night with the smoke of hell, Lady Macbeth's knife won't see what it is doing, and neither will heaven. Of course, a real knife has no eyes and God's eyes in heaven can see through night and smoke and all. The knife is used as a metaphor for something else, perhaps her will and 'heaven' is possibly a metaphor for her conscience.
In Shakespeare's time, as now, women were thought to be more naturally kind and much more gentle than men. But, Lady Macbeth, thinking deadly (stated as mortal) thoughts, calls in the 'spirits of murder' which will take away the womanly characteristics which is the part that stops her from killing and not care. Nowadays, we might show a woman talking to herself, saying 'you can do it', but can she? For a person wanting to be so very cold-hearted, she seems to talk quite a lot. She asks for her blood to be thick and her milk to be a bitter poison, but at the end she asks for the ability to kill without seeing what she is doing, and particularly not be seen.
She says, and I quote,
'Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry "Hold, hold!"
In an atmosphere of a black night with the smoke of hell, Lady Macbeth's knife won't see what it is doing, and neither will heaven. Of course, a real knife has no eyes and God's eyes in heaven can see through night and smoke and all. The knife is used as a metaphor for something else, perhaps her will and 'heaven' is possibly a metaphor for her conscience.