Word: affrights
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...humble voice of the narrator, the playwright cajoles the audience to suspend disbelief. It's a bit much to ask, he admits, but might we transform "this unworthy scaffold" of the stage into the "vasty fields of France? or may we cram/Within this wooden O the very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt?" For nearly four centuries, audiences have readily joined in this theatrical pretense. After all, who can refuse Shakespeare a favor...
...across great distances. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, wrote that a colt in rural Vermont, if it smells a fresh buffalo robe (the colt having no knowledge or experience of buffalo, which lived on the plains) will "start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrenzies of affright. Here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism of the world...
...shiver with affright...
...Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night. That church tower was a masterpiece of Victorian gimcrackery. It was so downright, honestly ugly that, like George Arliss, it was positively beautiful. The sound of its bell, to paraphrase Poe, was "In the startled ear of night/ How it screamed out its affright!" I think that old tower perhaps may have had a soul, and Burchfield, like William Blake, was able to commune with such spirits...
...nothing affright thee...