ABSTRACT
This sense of verbal power contained, though with difficulty, within a pattern of rhetoric, and expressed in a mounting and complicated imagery, where one motion is abandoned before it is fully developed as another comes crowding into the poet's mind, can be seen in the first speech by the King, opening with the lines :
No more the thirsty entrance of this soil Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood; No more shall trenching war channel her fields, Nor bruise her flowerets with the armed hoofs Of hostile paces: those opposed eyes, Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in the intestine shock And furious close of civil butchery Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks, March all one way and be no more opposed Against acquaintance, kindred and allies: The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife, No more shall cut his master.
