The Poet then, having seized on the Idea and purged it of what is trivial or accidental, reclothes it in a concrete dress and so represents it to us. And you will generally remark in the very greatest poets that not only are the images they represent to us extraordinarily definite and concrete and therefore vivid--as Dante, for example, will describe a Scene in Hell or in Paradise with as much particularity as though he were writing a newspaper report; but this concreteness of vision translates itself into a remarkable concreteness of speech. I suppose there was never a more concrete writer than Shakespeare, and his practice of translating all his idea into things which you can touch or see grew steadily stronger throughout his career, so that any competent critic can in a moment distinguish his later writing from his earlier by its compression of images in words, its forcible concretion of the various "parts of speech," its masterful _corv�e_ of nouns substantive to do the work of verbs, and so on. Even in very early work such as _Venus and Adonis_ we cannot but note this gift of vision, how quick and particular it is....
_Upon this promise did he raise his chin, Like a dive-dipper, peering through a wave, Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in...._
But in his later plays--so fast the images teem--he has to reach out among nouns, verbs, adverbs, with both strong hands, grasping what comes and packing it ere it can protest. Take for example:--
_Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care._
_The multitudinous sea incarnadine, Making the green one red._
_In the dark backward and abysm of time._
_My face I'll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots And with presented nakedness outface The winds and persecutions of the sky._
Or (for vividness) this, from _Antony and Cleopatra_, when Cleopatra cries out and faints over Antony's body:--
_O! withered is the garland of the war, The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon ..._
"Madam! Madam!" "Royal Egypt!" "Empress!" cry the waiting-maids as she swoons. She revives and rebukes them:--
_No more, but e'en a woman, and commanded By such poor passion as the maid that milks And does the meanest chares. It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods; To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stolen my jewel._