In its language, as in its action, the
drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we
see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of
ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down
trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful
hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which
pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are
horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry
'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of
the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his
throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings
of storm.
Now all these agencies--darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate
it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic
images--conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to
awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this
effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere
words of the Witches stir the same feelings,--those, for example, of the
spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary weeks,
and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam
that forms on the moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for
pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad, the finger of the
babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the
murderer's gibbet.
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