The scherzo is a pungent whirl of unwashed bodies, the storm a Gothic fantasy that erupts from the faintest thunder to a dazzling conflagration, the Shepherd's Song exquisitely light.
It has never stopped, even as the war has become like a faint distant thunder, unless, of course, it's your kid, spouse, mother or father out in the rain.
At the first faint rumblings of thunder we picked up the pace and docked in a hamlet called Frisco on the inside of the Cape Hatteras elbow.
Then comes "a faint noise as of thunder" that makes the ship quiver "as if the thunder had growled deep down in the water".
Elizabeth Rhodes's understated sound design offers textures like distant thunder, the faint din of a passing train and the quiet patter of rain, vividly evoking a sultry, breezy Florida evening on the verge of a tropical storm.
/ They come upon one suddenly, with a noise / of thunder and faint bells, their progress / Unsteady, vast overgrown toys / That have run away, and found this special route, / These special streets".
I suppose here, with a flash near enough, even if it were multiple, the eye would be so dazzled by the primitive flash as not to be able to see those that follow, but it is difficult to account in this way for the great distance implied by the faint audibility of the thunder.
Whereupon there comes a lurch, a collision with something below, a faint vibration "as if the thunder had growled deep down in the water".
As he manipulated a series of buttons and levers, the faint squeal of metal against metal preceded the thunder of falling water beneath the lock.
Peter O'Toole was generally derided for trying to restore Jacobean blood and thunder to his 1980 performance of Macbeth, which had people fainting with laughter rather than horror and revulsion.
