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In Romeo and Juliet,
Mercutio describes her thus:
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She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider's web;
The collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams;
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Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash, of film;
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid.
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night...
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In Nymphidia,
Drayton calls her Oberon's 'merry Queen', and describes her chariot as it is made ready by her fairy attendants for a journey:
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Four nimble gnats the horses were,
Their harnesses of gossamer,
Fly Cranion her charioteer
Upon the coach-box getting.
Her chariot of a snail's fine shell,
Which for the colours did excel,
The fair Queen Mab becoming well,
So lively was the limning ;
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The seat the soft wool of the bee,
The cover, gallantly to see,
The wing of a pied butterflee;
I trow 'twas simple trimming.
The wheels composed of crickets' bones,
And daintily made for the nonce,
For fear of rattling on the stones
With thistle-down they shod it...
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Shelley's Queen Mab (1813) - despite its beginning in which he invokes Mab, the Queen of Spells - is an ideological poem in which he attacks the Monarchy, War, Commerce and Religion.
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