Drunkard on an Egg (1592)

P. Brueghel the Younger, ca. 1590s. Illustration of a Dutch proverb (“the drunkard will end up in an empty eggshell”).

Two geese loiter

as in hope of crumbs

near the doorway

of a big thatched roof

low country farmhouse

from which a woman

wearing a white apron

and bonnet appears

out of interior dark

carrying a tray.

In the foreground

hogging the roundel

and seeming to obstruct

the path to the house

is a man in garish

red tunic straddling

what looks at first glance

to be a giant boulder

of igneous rock.

His tunic the reddest

hue in the painting,

pantaloons the flaxen

shade of his skin

and codpiece neatly

slip-tied with golden

cord to his belt.

His eye unfocused

but open, staring up

to the overcast morning

with rodent-like head

tilted back, dramming hard

from a pewter mug

blueish streaked either

with verdigris or perhaps

light from behind the viewer

where the cover of cloud

has broken revealing

a thumbsmudge of sky.

How the fabric is shorn

on the hood of his cape

and frayed out like

the ears of a boar

or ass. And the crack

in what the title recalls

is not rock but egg

gives like a window

into night. But one isn’t

sure to think it dark

when still unhatched

and light’s never seen

past the shell. There

in the hole, the same face

floats in the glair

of the man straddling

the egg above, ass-eared

hood up in paler red, blankly

gazing on the codpiece

about to burst its coin

like he too has let

his eyes unfocus into

feeling, finally realizing

now that it’s all over

or soon to begin again

and egg become

the rock it looks to be

what a fool he was.