Macbeth: I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

The time has been, my senses would have cooled

To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in’t: I have supped full with horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me.

In this soliloquy Macbeth expresses how he has been numbed to fear over his time being king. Firstly he says “I have almost forgot the taste of fears:” this is personifying fear as if it is a bad taste in his mouth that has gone away as his sanity has diminished. Then he says “The time has been, my senses would have cooled” here he is saying that there was a time when shrieking in the night would have made him go cold but now it seems that he wouldn’t be frightened by screaming in the night. This is a great use of irony as within the next minute of the play Lady Macbeth dies with a loud shriek as she commits suicide. Macbeth seems to be holding his fear in which could very well be what is deteriorating his mental state and making him go insane.