“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” is a remembered line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that recurs as the narrator faces the impending separation from his mother. First spoken in hesitation when he is urged to reach her before sunrise, it returns as he stands apart from her, giving the refrain a double force: tomorrow is the time he invokes to postpone action, yet the scene insists that there may be no tomorrow for their meeting.

The Line in the Moment of Urgency

The narrator recalls the line when he learns that his mother is on the Ile St. Louis, three doors to the right of Nicolas, and must be visited at once. Less than an hour remains before sunrise, and the journey to the tower will take three-quarters of that time. Faced with this narrowing interval, he stammers the refrain instead of setting out immediately.

The person urging him forward makes the stakes explicit: his mother will make no further trips to Italy, and coming to see him is her last journey. When the narrator fails to respond, the man grabs and shakes him, treating him as a boy who must be brought to his senses. The literary allusion thus enters a concrete crisis, where the repeated word tomorrow collides with a deadline that cannot be deferred.

Recurrence Beside His Mother

The phrase returns while the narrator is in the room with his mother. He has moved away from her without being conscious of doing so, and his attention catches on the painted nymphs, gilt door handles, and brittle stalactites of melted candle wax. Against these details, he thinks of her through the refrain again, while she holds to the windowsill and the light of house lamps, carriages, and nearby windows touches her thin face.

His mother asks him to speak and explain how things have come about. She says that he has brought happiness to all of them, then turns to the question of how it is with him. The repeated line stands beside that unanswered appeal: what first sounded like a stammer under pressure becomes the rhythm through which the narrator registers his distance from her and the pain of their encounter.

Function and Significance

The expression binds the two moments together without resolving them. At the first occurrence, the narrator uses a remembered passage to meet an urgent instruction with delay; at the second, the refrain accompanies his withdrawal even as his mother reaches toward him. Its repetition makes the allusion more than a literary ornament: it marks the gap between time imagined as endlessly available and the limited time the scene allows.

The evidence does not supply the rest of Macbeth’s passage or identify the narrator’s thoughts beyond these moments. Within the scene, however, the refrain’s return is unmistakable. Tomorrow is invoked precisely when the narrator is being told that his mother’s visit is her last, and its recurrence makes postponement sound less like a promise than an inability to answer in time.