What Are The Motifs Of Light And Dark In Romeo And Juliet

Question 4:

The motifs about light and dark during Romeo and Juliet emphasizes the beauty they see in each other and proves the idea that ¨love¨ can be easily consumed by just physical attractions and become superficial. One way this was shown was when Romeo says, ¨she doth teach the torches to burn bright¨(21), and ¨So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows¨(21). Here, the darkness around Juliet made her beauty stand out like a torch and her physical beauty synmbolized a white dove amongst black crows even though he didnt know anything about her. The contrast between the white dove to the black crow was a metaphor to explain how Juliets beauty was superior when compared to the other womens beauty, represented by crows. This can also be reconnected to Benvolio's idea that a new beauty could easily make Romeo forget about Rosaline or make ¨ thee think swan a

Here, Benvolio was trying to capture the idea that Rosaline was Romeos swan, but turned into a crow when he came across Juliet. Motifs like these two, use birds correlated with light and dark colors to enhance Juliets beauty compared to the others. In addition, Juliet mentioned, ¨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"(49). Because Juliet only used Romeos physical features to represent the light in a dark sky, it shows readers that Romeos other traits were not as valued by her and therefore their love was based merely off of appreance. As the story progresses, it becomes obvious that the motifs comparing light to dark represent Romeo and Juliet's physical attraction to eachother. Thus, Furthing the idea that their love was superficial because it was consumed by their physical attractions for each other, rather than incorporating other facotrs which were not mentioned