On the other hand, this poetry uses many direct and forcible metaphors, such as "wave-ropes" for ice, the "whale-road" or "swan-road" for the sea, the "foamy-necked floater" for a ship, the "war-adder" for an arrow, the "bone-house" for the body. The sword is said to sing a war song, the slain to be put to sleep with the sword, the sun to be a candle, the flood to boil. War is appropriately called the sword-game. Parallelisms.--The repetition of the same ideas in slightly differing form, known as parallelism, is frequent. The author, wishing to make certain ideas emphatic, repeated them with varying phraseology. As the first sight of land is important to the sailor, the poet used four different terms for the shore that met Beowulf's eyes on his voyage to Hrothgar: _land, brimclifu, beorgas, saen=aessas_ (land, sea-cliffs, mountains, promontories). This passage from the _Phoenix_ shows how repetition emphasizes the absence of disagreeable things:-- "...there may neither snow nor rain, Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire, Nor the headlong squall of hail, nor the hoar frost's fall, Nor the burning of the sun, nor the bitter cold, Nor the weather over-warm, nor the winter shower, Do their wrong to any wight."[27] The general absence of cold is here made emphatic by mentioning special cold things: "snow," "frost," "hail," "hoar frost," "bitter cold," "winter shower." The absence of heat is emphasized in the same way. Saxon contrasted with Celtic Imagery.--A critic rightly says: "The gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song of a few minutes more phrases of ornament than are to be found in the whole poem of _Beowulf_." In three lines of an old Celtic death song, we find three similes:-- "Black as the raven was his brow; Sharp as a razor was his spear; White as lime was his skin." We look in Anglo-Saxon poetry in vain for a touch like this:-- "Sweetly a bird sang on a pear tree above the head of Gwenn before they covered him with a turf."[28] Celtic literature shows more exaggeration, more love of color, and a deeper appreciation of nature in her gentler aspects. The Celt could write:-- "More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain."[29] King Arthur and his romantic Knights of the Round Table are Celtic heroes. Possibly the Celtic strain persisting in many of the Scotch people inspires lines like these in more modern times:-- "The corn-craik was chirming His sad eerie cry [30] And the wee stars were dreaming Their path through the sky." In order to produce a poet able to write both _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _Hamlet_, the Celtic imagination must blend with the Anglo-Saxon seriousness. As we shall see, this was accomplished by the Norman conquest. ANGLO-SAXON PROSE