The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a
swound!
It was aimed by a soldier, James Hadmentally unbalanced through
swounds to his head while fighting French.
After a metrical pause, perhaps an implied cue for a moment of wooziness, Angelo describes his heart as like "one that
swounds" and the blood that rushes towards it as like "foolish throngs" that block the air by crowding in "obsequious fondness" and "untaught love" (2.4.24, 28, 27).
The Mariner's sufferance of the weird visions, sensations, "
swounds," and sounds that beset him is, one might argue, the leitmotif of The Rime: the parching heat and his intolerable thirst, the pitiless judgment delivered upon him by his fellow crew members, the bearing of his guilt, and the "ten thousand" agonies that Coleridge imagined racking the Mariner every time he told his history (see Table Talk 1: 273-74).
Ha, '
swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall...
[anaphora; parison] Hah, '
swounds, I should take it; [interjection] A: for it cannot be but I am pigeon-liver'd, B: And lack gall to make oppression bitter, [lacking gall; antithesis; parallelism] Or ere this I should 'a' fatted all the region kites with this slave's offal [i.e., if I had gall; antithesis] B: Bloody, bawdy villain!
Yet, Hamlet chooses to swear in terms of Christian images; he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that "by my fay I cannot reason" (2.2.251), and later swears by "Sblood" (2.2.336, 3.2.334), "God's bodkin" (2.2.485), "
swounds" (2.2.528, 5.1.240), and "i'faith" (3.2.82).
When Othello arrives to break up the drunken brawl which Iago has engineered in Act II, Montano immediately tells him, in F: '
Swounds, I bleed still.
In Chapter 2, "
Swounds Revisited: Theatrical, Editorial, and Literary Expurgation', Taylor provides statistical evidence to 'prove' that the expurgation which resulted from the 1606 'Acte to restraine Abuses of Players' stemmed from theatrical changes and not from the interventions of scribes and compositors.