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Home » Quotes » The Tempest » Come away, servant, come. I am ready now

Come away, servant, come. I am ready now

Prospero Prospero puts on his cloak.
Come away, servant, come. I am ready now.
Approach, my Ariel. Come.
 Enter Ariel.
Ariel
All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure. Be ’t to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.

My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?

Prospero
Hast thou, spirit,
Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?
Ariel
To every article.
I boarded the King’s ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement. Sometimes I’d divide
And burn in many places. On the topmast,
The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. Jove’s lightning, the precursors
O’ th’ dreadful thunderclaps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not. The fire and cracks
Of sulfurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake.
Prospero
My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?
Ariel
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and played
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me. The King’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—
Was the first man that leaped; cried “Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.”
Prospero
Why, that’s my spirit!
But was not this nigh shore?
Ariel
Close by, my master.
Prospero
But are they, Ariel, safe?
Ariel
Not a hair perished.
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before; and, as thou bad’st me,
In troops I have dispersed them ’bout the isle.
The King’s son have I landed by himself,
Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs
In an odd angle of the isle, and sitting,
His arms in this sad knot. He folds his arms.
Prospero
Of the King’s ship,
The mariners say how thou hast disposed,
And all the rest o’ th’ fleet.
Ariel
Safely in harbor
Is the King’s ship. In the deep nook, where once
Thou called’st me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vexed Bermoothes, there she’s hid;
The mariners all under hatches stowed,
Who, with a charm joined to their suffered labor,
I have left asleep. And for the rest o’ th’ fleet,
Which I dispersed, they all have met again
And are upon the Mediterranean float,
Bound sadly home for Naples,
Supposing that they saw the King’s ship wracked
And his great person perish.
Prospero
Ariel, thy charge
Exactly is performed.

Source:
Act 1
Scene 2
Line 222

Source Type:

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