Two minutes later.
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ome to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers . . . Malcolm, in his pretense to Macduff, says. Nay, had I pow’r, I shouldPour the sweet milk of concord into hell . . . Here we have a triple association of that which nourishes and is boundto the ideas of “kindness” and “concord,” with the ideas “fear,” “gall,”“hell” producing, for the reader, a sense of chaos, of the unnatural,which IS fundamental to the play. We begin, as human beings, withmilk-we end, in this play, in blood— and the patterns are set againsteach other in such a way as to suggest that the whole spectrum ofhuman possibilities is being explored with dismay. Images of court-ship, procreation, infancy, allied to the milk pattern, intensify theirony, as in Banquo’s speech on arriving at Macbeth’s castle, “woo-ingly . . . bed . . . procreant cradle” (i. 6. 6“8.)— the birthing,here, is to be a murder— and Macbeth’s Pity, like a naked new-born babe. Striding the blast, and Lady Macbeth’s terrifying I have given suck, and knowHow tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, And dashed the brains out, had I so swornAs you have done to this. Images— and ideas, as in this solemn undertaking of Macbeth’s to doevil— which in nature are wholly separate and opposed, are joined bythe dramatist. The interweaving of the consequent patterns is one ofthe aspects of this tragedy the reader will want to explore for himself. 1960 7 ^
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