Introduction
The occasion and date of this little comic work is not known but its physical makeup shows that it was one of the
bouts rimés
that DGR and his siblings wrote in the late 1840s together—the most famous of which is probably
“Another Love”
. In the manuscript, the right margin carries a list of fourteen rhyme words in ink, and the text of the poem is constructed upon those words in pencil to their left. The rhymes clearly called for a sonnet but DGR's is a free comic treatment that fractures the expectation in the very first lines.
As to the theme, DGR recurs to this kind of gothic material all his life, sometimes treating it in a comic mode (as here), sometimes more seriously.
The only known text of this work is the rough draft on a small sheet of paper in the library of the South African National Gallery.