Fond, flatt'ring world, adieu!

Royalty is a fine burial shroud.

For my own part, I adhere to the maxim of antiquity, that the throne is a glorious sepulchre.

Fond, flatt'ring world, adieu!

For a king, death is better than dethronement and exile.

It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women: women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren't a woman. Weren't even quite human. The magical animal woman is, or can be, a metaphor for those sorts of women.