] easily turns the storm of Passion from
himself against Desdemona, and works him up into a trembling agony
of doubt and fear, in which he abandons all his love and hopes in a
breath.
Now do I see'tis true. Look here, Iago,
All my fond love thus do I blow to Heav'n. Tis gone.
Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell;
Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne
To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught;
For'tis of aspicks' tongues.
From this time, his raging thoughts 'never look back, ne'er ebb to
humble love' till his revenge is sure of its object, the painful
regrets and involuntary recollections of past circumstances which
cross his mind amidst the dim trances of passion, aggravating the
sense of his wrongs, but not shaking his purpose. Once indeed, where
Iago shows him Cassio with the handkerchief in his hand, and making
sport (as he thinks) of his misfortunes, the intolerable bitterness
of his feelings, the extreme sense of shame, makes him fall to
praising her accomplishments and relapse into a momentary fit of
weakness, 'Yet, oh, the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!' This
returning fondness, however, only serves, as it is managed by Iago,
to whet his revenge, and set his heart more against her. In his
conversations with Desdemona, the persuasion of her guilt and the
immediate proofs of her duplicity seem to irritate his resentment
and aversion to her; but in the scene immediately preceding her
death, the recollection of his love returns upon him in all its
tenderness and force; and after her death, he all at once forgets
his wrongs in the sudden and irreparable sense of his loss:
My wife! My wife! What wife? I have no wife.
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