What is rattling?

Famous quotes containing the word rattling:

    Nodding, its great head rattling like a gourd,
    And locks like seaweed strung on the stinking stone,
    The nightmare stumbles past,
    Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)

    Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest looking persons I ever see; except one, and that was uncle Silas, when he come in, and they told it all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn’t know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer meeting sermon that night that give him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn’t a understood it.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    You’ve strung your breasts
    with a rattling rope of pearls,
    tied a jangling belt
    around those deadly hips
    and clinking jewelled anklets
    on both your feet.
    So, stupid,
    if you run off to your lover like this,
    banging all these drums,
    then why
    do you shudder with all this fear
    and look up, down;
    in every direction?
    Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.?, Kashmirian king, compiler, author of some of the poems in the anthology which bears his name. translated from the Amaruataka by Martha Ann Selby, vs. 31, Motilal Banarsidass (1983)