Death and Premonitions Thereof

Both lovers have intimations of coming death – Romeo before he even arrives at the Capulet's party, and Juliet when she sees Romeo climbing from her window on his way to exile in Mantua. "Oh god, I have an ill-divining soul," she calls down to him. "Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, / as one dead in the bottom of a tomb" (3.5.8). In the most literal possible way, Juliet's drug-induced deathlike state foreshadows her own death. And the apothecary from whom Romeo buys the poison is described as looking like death – thin, starving, with hollow eyes. Romeo buys his suicide weapon from a man that symbolizes death.