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.

These lines are spoken by Juliet in Shakespeare’s tragedy *Romeo and Juliet*, during the balcony scene. Having just learned that Romeo is a Montague—enemy to her Capulet family—Juliet nonetheless yields to the intensity of their sudden love. In Act 3, Scene 2, as she impatiently awaits nightfall and Romeo’s arrival after their secret marriage, she imagines Romeo transfigured after death into stars that beautify the heavens. The speech belongs to a sequence of images in which Juliet associates Romeo with light and celestial radiance, even as the play’s action is moving toward violence and catastrophe.

Juliet’s fantasy turns mortal loss into cosmic beauty: Romeo’s death would not end love but scatter it across the sky, making night itself an object of universal devotion. The conceit intensifies the play’s recurring opposition between night and day—night as the lovers’ refuge, day as the realm of public feud and “garish” exposure. Her language also foreshadows the tragedy’s outcome, revealing how love in the play is inseparable from death and memorialization. The image of being “cut…out in little stars” suggests both violence and apotheosis, capturing the paradox of a love that feels eternal yet is threatened by the world’s brutality.