This expressive word ‘heave’ is repeated in the passage which describes her reception of Kent’s letter:
Pantingly forth, as if it press’d her heart:
two or three broken ejaculations escape her lips, and she ‘starts’ away ‘to deal with grief alone.’ The same trait reappears with an ineffable beauty in the stifled repetitions with which she attempts to answer her father in the moment of his restoration:
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
Cor. And so I am, I am.
Lear. Be your tears wet? yes, faith. I pray, weep not;
If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:
You have some cause, they have not.
Cor. No cause, no cause.
We see this trait for the last time, marked by Shakespeare with a decision clearly intentional, in her inability to answer one syllable to the last words we hear her father speak to her:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies. . . .
She stands and weeps, and goes out with him silent. And we see her alive no more.
But (I am forced to dwell on the point, because I am sure to slur it over is to be false to Shakespeare)
Aldis Wright says ‘more ponderous’ has the appearance of being a player’s correction to avoid a piece of imaginary bad grammar. Does it not sound more like the author’s improvement of a phrase that he thought a little flat? And, apart from that, is it not significant that it expresses the same idea of weight that appears in the phrase ‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’?
