nikhil.io

This is an illustration for a poem. Here’s an explanation via a Reddit post for I tried to read the entire thing but lost enthusiasm.

The Devil has come to punish a farmer who tricked him. The farmer hides in a big vat of holy water, his wife comes out sobbing about how violent and fearsome her husband is. She warns the devil:

For God’s sake try, my lord, to get away
Just now I heard the savage fellow say
He’d with his claws your lordship tear and slash
See, only, my lord, he made this gash;
On which she showed:— what you will guess, no doubt
And put the demon presently to rout
Who crosses himself and trembled with a fright
He’d never seen nor heard of such a sight,
Where scratch from claws or nails do appeared;

So the joke is the devil has never seen a vagina before, assumes the wife has been castrated, and that the farmer will castrate him too. Also the implication is the wife has a gigantic vagina. Its a stupid bawdy joke, from a century full of stupid bawdy jokes (also funnier in the prose original in Rabelais’ Gargantuan and Pantagruel — this is a later versification).