Ballade Tragique à Double Refrain
SCENE: A Room in Windsor Castle TIME: The Present
Enter a Lady-in-Waiting and a Lord-in-Waiting
SHE: Slow pass the hours—ah, passing, slow!
My doom is worse than anything
Conceived by Edgar Allan Poe:
The Queen is duller than the King.
HE: Lady, your mind is wandering;
You babble what you do not mean.
Remember, to your heartening,
The King is duller than the Queen.
SHE: No, most emphatically No!
To one firm-rooted fact I cling
In my now chronic vertigo:
The Queen is duller than the King.
HE: Lady, you lie. Last evening
I found him with a Rural Dean,
Talking of district-visiting . . .
The King is duller than the Queen.
SHE: At any rate he doesn’t sew!
You don’t see him embellishing
Yard after yard of calico . . .
The Queen is duller than the King.
Oh to have been an underling
To (say) the Empress Josephine!
HE: Enough of your self-pitying!
The King is duller than the Queen.
SHE (firmly): The Queen is duller than the King.
HE: Death then for you shall have no sting.
[Stabs her and, as she falls dead, produces phial
from breast-pocket of coat.]
Nevertheless, sweet friend Strychnine,
[Drinks.]
The King—is—duller than—the Queen.
[Dies in terrible agony.]
The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse, ed. by Geoffrey Grigson (Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1980), 371-2.
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