The Critics Weigh In

More from Walker Percy:

Lord Kames had criticized the metaphor "steep'd" in Othello's speech

Had it pleas'd heaven
To try me with affliction, had he rain'd
All kinds of sores, and shames, on my bare head,
Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips

by saying that "the resemblance is too faint to be agreeable -- Poverty here must be conceived to be a fluid which it resembles not in any manner." Richards goes further: "It is not a case of lack of resemblances but too much diversity, too much sheer oppositeness. For Poverty, the Tenor, is a state of deprivation, of dessication; but the vehicle -- the sea or vat in which Othello is to be steep'd -- gives an instance of superfluity ..."

From Message in the Bottle