IDLE SPECULATIONS: A Notable Encounter

IDLE SPECULATIONS: A Notable Encounter
Excerpt:

The description of the scene by Enobarbus in the play is one of the great speeches in English drama. It is pure poetry, appealing to all the senses of the listener`s imagination:

"When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up
his heart, upon the river of Cydnus ...

I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion--cloth-of-gold of tissue--
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature...

When told that there was never a man like Antony, Cleopatra replies:

"You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.

But, if there be, or ever were, one such,

It's past the size of dreaming; nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with fancy; yet to imagine

An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,

Condemning shadows quite."

(V. Scene 2. 94-99)