The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night

Friar Lawrence: priest, gardener, apothecary, trouble-maker.

I knew from the start that I didn't want to learn anything too obvious from Romeo & Juliet. Like Hamlet, this play has so much of it infused in the zeitgeist, but each has dark corners that are as remarkable as they are uncelebrated. As gorgeous as the lovers' exchanges are (their first lines spoken to one another forms a sonnet, for Jebus' sake), I wanted something more personal.

Enter the good friar and his garden of good intentions. The man has a lot of choice words for Romeo and his love life, but ultimately backs the hasty teenager to a degree that borders on unwise. In the Baz Luhrmann film, Friar Lawrence nurses this most infamous of star-cross'd relationships with the same zeal as he has for growing his questionable botanicals. He later employs one of his concoctions to help Juliet fake her death, but his secret letter to Romeo explaining the ruse doesn't quite make its way into the lover's hands.

In this speech, the hapless gardener waxes about the overlapping attributes of men and plants, and how each is often host to antithetical qualities. Life in fair Verona has made him quite the expert on such things, as everyone is so equally loyal and loving to their families and so resentful and hateful toward their neighbor.

Every Saturday, I go out on my patio and water and fertilize my collection of orchids. I spend a fair amount of time documenting their growth, taking pictures and making notes on what seems to make each one happy and healthy. Ever since I learned this speech, I recite it to my plants as go about my work. After a long week, these words serve as a reminder that not all things are as they appear, but we must keep tending our lives with diligence, for even the bad can be distilled and made useful.


Romeo & Juliet, Act II, Sc. III
Friar Lawrence: The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels:
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night's dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb,
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain'd from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.