h, and a lover's company is elevated in importance to the need for food and drink. But Hermia and Lysander are not going to see each other by the light of day. The scant light of midnight-midnight, when dawn and dusk are both equally far off-will provide all the necessary illumination for their "lovers' food." The darkness of night is only intensified by the forest location, and yet these lovers are expected in the course of the play to come to see each other more fully. "Setting eyes" on someone is also an expression for falling in love. Note Helena's tortured complaint that "ere Demetrius looked on Hermia's eyne He hailed down oaths that he was only mine" (1.1., ll. 242-3). Vision as a key part of love plays itself out fully in this line: eye contact is vital, because looking at someone looking at you is perhaps the most basic physical confrontation of another person's subjectivity (compare the experience of eye contact to the impossibility of hearing someone hear you, or smelling someone smell you). Demetrius looks int
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