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 —

Ingrazio: 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 its juridical indentures, and besides
A client ledger swole with hedgèd bets
A skein, ahem, of aleatory contingencies
By which the saucy gand’rers recompense us.

Nuncle: (Regarding the sheaf) ’Tis too bad, then, dear Ingrazio:
Herewith, grim tidings.

Ingrazio: Oh?

Nuncle: It seems thy favourite flockery
Hath turn’d its webbèd toes askance the sky.

Ingrazio: (Shocked) You what? How so? How so! What is ’t?

Nuncle: A creditors’ petition to sequestrate the goosers’ plant.

Queen: Black news! Oho!

Enter Triago, ignorant of the foregoing

Triago: Why, 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.
Pray, Madam: allow my song.

Triago produces a piccolino from his cloak and begins to play.

Queen: (Sotto voce) By Homer’s stick! Who let him in?

Ingrazio: ’Tis not the season that rends the royal jams, dear Trig:
But the harvest that it brings. Put away thy tiny fiddle, sir
’Ere her majesty so commands.

Nuncle: Or brains you with ’t.

Ingrazio: Bankrupt? The goosers? It cannot be!

Queen: Must the rigid struts of precedent
That fix our covenantry as stars
To the very velvet firmament
So dissolve, upon one distemper’d prayer?
Must our claim, short days ago as bankable
To visor’d men who tabulate exposures
As a helm to sconce in battle —
Now so meekly dissipate, as tissue i’ the rain?

Nuncle: If wettened claims were but thy 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.

Ingrazio: 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.

Ingrazio: 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 alive wi’ it. We are a-loss, not now, but then:
As at the beat said prayer was laid — nay, one beat prior.
The body’s dead and two-week stiff,
O’er raked by public hands
Afore we lodge our deposition.

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.