Absalom and Achitophel advice of the double agent Hushai over the good advice of Achitophel. Achitophel, realising that the rebellion is doomed to failure, goes home and hangs himself. Absalom is killed (against David's explicit commands) after getting caught by his hair in the thick branches of a great oak tree: "His head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on" (NRSV 2 Sam. 18:9). The death of his son, Absalom, causes David enormous personal grief. A second allegory in the poem, beginning on line 425, is the
Francis the Talking Mule Francis the Talking Mule Francis the Talking Mule was a mule character who became a celebrity during the 1950s as the star of seven popular Universal-International film comedies. The character originated in the 1946 novel "Francis" by former U.S. Army Captain David Stern III (1909–2003), son of newspaper publisher J. David Stern. After another studio turned down the property, Universal bought the rights for a film series, with Stern adapting his own script for the first entry, simply titled "Francis". From the "Francis" book jacket: Under the nom de plume of Peter Stirling, Stern wrote several short stories for "Esquire"