Last night the very gods show’d me a vision,—
I fast and pray’d for their intelligence,—thus:
I saw Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle, wing’d
From the spongy south to this part of the west,
Then vanisht in the sunbeams: which portends—
Unless my sins abuse my divination—
Success to the Roman host.
-Soothsayer
Cymbeline Act IV, Scene ii, Line 347
Well there are certainly a number of things we can talk about with today’s Totally Random line, aren’t there? Where to start?
Okay, for starters, the soothsayer is talking to the leader of the Roman forces who are in Britain. So let me see if I got this right. The soothsayer saw in his dream a Roman eagle flying up from the spongy (spongy?) south into the west, where the Romans are, and then vanishing into the light of the sun. And this portends victory for the Romans. Huh. Well that’s interesting.
‘Rainy, damp, soggy, moisture filled.’ That’s what my Shakespeare’s Words glossary gives me on ‘spongy’. Well that applies to just about all of England, doesn’t it? I’ve only been to England once, and yes, it rained quite a bit and we saw very little sunshine. Apparently though, it wasn’t raining in the west of England at the time of this play because this soggy bird found some sunlight to fly off into.
And that means the Romans are going to win. Indeed!
This is another one of those trips where we saw very little sunlight, though this was Nova Scotia, not England. We'd been driving for days in the rain and we finally saw some blue sky, so we stopped the VW microbus and got out to take a picture of it. That's me on the right with all the hair and Steve Pileski on the left. We're trying to point to the blue sky while George takes the picture, but by the time he snapped it the blue sky was gone. And this is all we ended up with. So instead of seeing the Roman eagle vanish into the sunbeams we just saw the blue sky vanish into the clouds. But there was indeed a vanishing that took place, and it was no dream.
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