It is plastic that fire and sea are
foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive
army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who
enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of
Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls
laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his
back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did
not, and could not, exist in antiquity.
The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his
feelings, the more he can see in Nature.
Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors,
new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were
for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.
The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod
in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature
and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring
time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian
blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all
Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had
declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they
would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had
been expressed in antiquity.
This is Shakespeare's treatment of them:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase .
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