Oberon’s perspective

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon’s speech to Puck: “Cupid, all arm’d: a certain aim he took / […] / It landed on a little western flower / Before milk white, now purple with love’s wound”
• Kubla Khan

Awen, muse

Metatropes

• Dylan: Blonde on Blonde is “thin wild mercury music”
• The Long Winters’s descriptions of their records. (Click through on each one for more metatropey goodness.)

Transformative alchemy

• Shakespeare’s plots were all stolen. (Except The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but probably we’ve lost the original plays their storylines were pilfered from.)
• Masters of War adapts the melody of Nottamun Town
• White Summer adapts the melody of She Moves Through the Fair
• Kubla Khan — opening transforms Purchas: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.”
• Ozymandias by Shelley tells the same story as the poem by Smith — both are ‘transforming’ an invisible third poem. (?)

Contrastive connotations

• Dylan: “thin wild mercury music”
• Dylan: “wild cathedral evening”

Magic

• Hemingway’s six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Overlays and ambiguity

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in Athens, but is actually very much like Elizabethan England

Folk imagery

• Nottamun Town
• Bron-Y-Aur Stomp

Subconscious perspective

• Trams look odd because they’re trains on streets
• Chesterton on railway stations