from "reginald's rubaiyat"

the duchess wanted me to write something in her album -- something persian, you know, and just a little decadent -- and i thought a quartrain on an unwholesome egg would meet the requirement of the case. so i started in with:

cackle, cackle, little hen,
how i wonder if and when
once you laid the egg that i
met, alas too late. amen.

the duchess objected to the amen, which i thought gave an air of forgiveness and chose jugee to the whole thing; also she said it wasn't persian enough, as though i were trying to sell her a kitten whose mother had married for love rather than pedigree. so i recast it entirely, and the new version read:

the hen that laid thee moons ago, who knows
in what dead yesterday her shades repose;
to some election turn thy waning span
and rain thy rottenness on fiscal foes.

i thought there was enough suggestion of decay in that to satisfy a jackal, and to me there was something infinitely pathetic and appealing in the idea of the egg having a sort of st. luke's summer of commercial usefulness.