Sesquipedality: Edward Capern At Boscobel House

... [into] the oaken box in which the hunted King was secreted.... Capern essayed to descend... - Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country (1868) Suppose a poet-postman, full of good Victorian Embonpoint, should chance to Step into this house of hiding – a nook unknown to Questing Roundhead spies – and think to slip Unseen into the oubliette fitted out In Cromwell’s days for a king; suppose this very Poet – more portly in the midriff than Charles Escaping from his throne – gets caught Dead-center in the all-too-narrow trap-door gap. Alas, for all his wriggling, he’s trapped Longitudinally between floors. What can a poet, Ill-versed in such historic lore, do but Taunt the Muses with his long, many-syllabled Yelps, unrhyming but in vivid metaphor?