Why "brief candles?" The reference, as you may recall, is from Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy which he delivers on hearing his wife has just killed herself. Here it is in full--like the play itself, the height of conciseness:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace
From day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays
Have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
One way to interpret "brief candle" here (as most critics have) is as a metaphor for our short lifespans, in particular the just snuffed-out. Given the previous lines, though, it seems to me to stand for the present. Having dismissed any potential satisfactions available in the futurity of countless, albeit numbered tomorrows, and having spit upon the false solaces and fatal endings of yesterdays, the reeling king refuses to admit to his tortured mind the only illumination ever available to us. His tragic wisdom, ripe and true--that our lives as lived are empty monologues--razes all cognition, and with it all hope.
But had he obeyed that one human faculty capable of discrimination, what he earlier calls "the pauser, reason," and stopped to consider for a moment, just one brief candle, perhaps....but then he would not have been Macbeth.
We, neither regicides nor fratricides (for the most part), are free to look and listen, taste, feel, and smell the brief candles, or rather this Brief Candle that never goes out.
