Template:Dkt autumnal humours
Queen: (Wildly waving a sheaf) Black news! Black news!
The Mercantile Anserine Trading Co, Pty Ltd.
Who purveys our favourite geese —
Ingraziatoro: What of it, Ma’am? ’Tis assuredly
A most heartily-endow’d incorporation:
Well-skilled in varied means of gandery.
Its full-filled trouser does no little filip to our ends:
We have, a-desk, a fecund inventory
Of that juridical personage’s indentures.
Nuncle: (Regarding the sheaf) ’Tis too bad, Ingraziatoro.
Herewith, grim tidings: it seems thy favourite flockery
Hath turn’d its webbèd toes toward the sky.
Ingraziatoro: You what? How so? How so! What is ’t?
Nuncle: A creditors’ petition to sequestrate its goosey plant.
Enter Triago
Queen: Black news! Oho!
Triago: Majesty! Let not thy dread a-weight the regal brow
More brusquely than thy splendoured diadem!
O, Queen! Let not autumnal humours bring thee low!
Queen: (Sotto voce) Who let him in?
Nuncle: ’Tis not the season that rends the royal jams, dear Trig:
But the harvest that it brings.
Ingraziatoro: Bankrupt? The goosers? It can’st not be!
Queen: Must the rigid struts of precedent
That fix our covenantry as stars
Pinned to the velvet firmament
So dissolve upon intemperate petition?
Must our claim, short days ago as bankable
To visor’d men who tabulate our fore and aft exposures
As iron to a helm in battle
Now so wetly dissipate as tissue i’ the rain?
Nuncle: If wetting claims were the only problem.
Queen: What mean you, fool?
Nuncle: Thy claims make bitter pennies
Of what once were sweetened pounds, ’tis so:
But less so thy extant liabilities. They yet stand
And keep their stout and craggy shape.
Ingraziatoro: Pish! Doth one not cancel t’other
By the golden sorcery of offset?
Nuncle: Alack: that happy magic is abruptly stayed:
Th’administrstor’s deeper conjury sees to ’t:
The fundamental order of the world’s abeyed.
And yet the woe is more: the curvèd shape
Of lexical geometry conspires to hold us dangled:
Alive, yet unempower’d, while all about
The tempest runs unchecked this next rude fortnight.
Ingraziatoro: Cans’t thou make it simpler, boy?
Nuncle: As simple as ’t may be made, not simpler:
The petition may be put aside, or resiled
It may yet expire: we knoweth not for half-a-month.
If “yea”, we carry on, with hopeful heart —
’Twas but a freighted dream, unspun upon the waking.
If “nay”, the spectral wraith outlives the night:
We are awake wi’ it. We are a-loss, not now, but then:
As at the beat we took our draught — nay, one beat prior.
The body’s dead and two-week stiff,
O’er raked by public hands
Afore we lodge our depopsition.
Queen: Mark our wither’d arm, boy:
Lest our allotted time
Along these salted strands, and
Beneath the teeming feathered roils
That drench this sad allotment
Taper down.
Triago: We are dying, French Guyana, dying.
Nuncle: Let us not be too dramatic.