Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
– William Shakespeare
King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2. Cast out by his daughters, a mad Lear is on the wild heath shouting at the storm and telling it to rage and blow for all it is worth. The once powerful King of Britain absurdly shouts orders to the raging wind, rain, thunder and lightning. He bids the storm to strike him with lightning and drown the whole world. Lear has lost all his power but does not appear to realize it. The tempestuous weather is a metaphor for the turmoil inside the mind of Lear, who is overflowing with anger and beginning to lose his sanity after clashing with his ungrateful daughters.