Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

This quatrain is from Hilaire Belloc’s satirical verse in which he skewers public life with epigrammatic cruelty and a deliberately jaunty rhyme. Belloc (1870–1953)—journalist, polemicist, and MP (1906–1910)—wrote many short poems that mock political hypocrisy, cant, and the theatrical “display” surrounding power. The lines present a funeral scene: the politician is buried with pomp while acquaintances jeer. The speaker’s private grief is a comic reversal—he mourns not the death, but the lost chance to see the politician executed—typical of Belloc’s black humor and his taste for moral caricature.

The poem’s joke turns on incongruity and moral inversion. Publicly, the politician receives an ornate burial (“richly…ridiculous display”), suggesting empty ceremony and reputational laundering after death. Privately, the speaker’s tears are not compassion but frustrated vindictiveness: he wanted a harsher, more “deserved” end. Belloc uses the tight, sing-song meter to heighten the savagery, making the cruelty feel like a nursery rhyme—an effect that exposes how easily righteous indignation can become gleeful hatred. The quatrain also implies a broader cynicism: political life breeds such contempt that even death cannot command respect, only competing forms of scorn.