I find it interesting that in this one moment, Orlando saw Sasha, the woman she once loved. After all this time, she still hadn't overcome the heartbreak of the person closest to her heart leaving her. She still had intense feelings for her in spite of the hundreds of years that had passed. Because the image of Sasha in her youth has seared itself in her mind, she is surprised that the woman in front of her is so fat, and hides from this person, having seemingly overcome her feelings of passion.

Rather than have us read through pages upon pages of an average conversation, which we as readers would find boring, the biographer instead leaves a vast empty space at the end of the paragraph to skip past these two hours of conversation and keep the narrative going.

Here a comparison is made between standard conversations and poetry, which are believed to exist in two separate worlds. Poetry is a series of words organized in a certain pattern that evokes a certain feeling. Even the most boring of conversations can hold a deeper, poetic meaning to it. But the ordinary conversation, which is poetry, can't be written down because to us as readers, it is anything but poetry. To Shel and Orlando, the loving conversation they had was poetic, but to us, it would just be a generic conversation without any substance.

This sounds like an oxymoron. The commonest expressions do, yet no expressions do. No expressions are sufficient to describe what is going on in the human heart when two people love each other, so the most common, run-of-the-mill expressions are the best way of reflecting the human heart. Perhaps because symbolic expressions are ineffective, common expressions are the best option to illustrate such a romance.

Since the last thing the biographer mentions is 'boots in London', this has a double meaning. Hearing two characters talk about buying boots in London is boring to us as readers because we are detached from the setting: it has nothing to do with our life in America. Additionally, the words passed between Shel and Orlando, taken out of their romantic setting, is meaningless.

This expression is an example of irony. The biographer claims that saying anything is the same as saying nothing to show how meaningless their conversation would be to the reader, who is unable to grasp the full meaning of what they are saying.

Here the biographer is being intentionally vague. Rather than specify what they talked about, the biographer instead gives several ideas of what they might be talking about.

All of Orlando's servants immediately calmed down after the initial revelation that Orlando is a woman, with Mrs. Grimsditch implying that she suspected this all along. Since Orlando's sex change is an allegory the biographer comes up with to try to make sense of the information gathered after a certain point, is it possible that there is a deeper meaning to Orlando's sex change? Since he was described as a womanly man and is now described as a manly woman, does that mean he was always a woman, but concealed her true identity for a period of time? How does this change how we view Orlando's frequent costume changes later in the chapter, knowing that he has the experience and endowments of both sexes?

-Max

Orlando looks at the sky and the grass and tries to portray them in the simplest way possible. But he quickly finds that inadequate, and comes up with similes for both the sky and the grass. As soon as he comes up with these similes though, he is immediately frustrated with how untrue those similes are. This upsets him, as he wants to represent the truth, but the truth isn't enough to express how he feels about his surroundings.

Orlando was coming up with a metaphor involving a dragon fly in living at the bottom of the sea to try to express what love means. A possible metaphor could have been that love is like a fly, a single spark of interest, floating through a sea of passion. But Orlando rejects this metaphor because it is physically impossible for a dragon fly to live at the bottom of the ocean, showing his fury with the metaphor and figures of speech.

Here the biographer is exaggerating to express how slow the passage of time feels when you’re stuck on a single concept. To Orlando, it seems to take an eternity to come up with a good lie.

Max here again. This line is a rather interesting one. The first part, 'sportful malice', is an oxymoron that combines the idea of fun with acting out of spite against a person. The second, 'pluck on laughter', seems to be metonymy, where 'pluck' is used in place of 'gain' or any other word that would fit better. The effect is that the prank Toby, Maria, and the Fool pulled on Malvolio was for entertainment, and should be seen as funny rather than as deserving of punishment.

Maxwell Aguilar here, in case you can't see my name under the profile. Anways, this line is personification, claiming that time can have revenge. What Feste is saying is that time has brought revenge on Malvolio for his pompous actions.