“smear
The sleepy grooms with the blood.”
But Macbeth's nerve is gone; he is physically broken now as well as mentally o'erwrought; he cries:
“I'll go no more;
I am afraid to think what I have done.
Look on't again I dare not.”
All this is exquisitely characteristic of the nervous student who has been screwed up to a feat beyond his strength, “a terrible feat,” and who has broken down over it, but the words are altogether absurd in the mouth of an ambitious, half-barbarous chieftain.
His wife chides him as fanciful, childish—“infirm of purpose,”—she'll put the daggers back herself; but nothing can hearten Macbeth; every household noise sets his heart thumping:
“Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me when every noise appals me?”
His mind rocks; he even imagines he is being tortured:
“What hands are here? Ha!
They pluck out my eyes.”
And then he swings into another incomparable lyric:
“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.”