When we ran “A Tragic Story” as the Sun’s Poem of the Day last spring — comic verses about a man who could not get his pigtail to hang in front, no matter how fast he twirled — we began with the observation: “William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was a novelist, of course . . .” And it’s difficult to know how else to start talking about Thackeray. He’s much faded from the days, especially in the first half of the 20th century in America, in which he was thought among the greatest of Victorian novelists, second only to (and perhaps even surpassing) Dickens. Still, “Vanity Fair” and “The Luck of Barry Lyndon,” perhaps “The Newcomes,” are monuments hard to ignore.

Precisely because he was a Victorian, however, Thackeray also wrote some poems, if only because of the reading public’s knowledge of the art. His occasional verse, scattered through his works, ended up running over 200 pages when collected in a posthumous 1869 volume called “Ballads and Tales.” 

Among those poems is an old favorite of the Sun’s editors: “The Mahogany Tree,” a yuletide poem about drinking and laughing in the outdoors around a village tree. “Christmas is here,” it opens, and the meter is interesting: two-stress lines, within a single foot, since each line is really a choriamb:  BEAT-not-not-BEAT, as in Thackeray’s “ONCE on the BOUGHS,” and “BIRDS of rare PLUME,” and “SANG, in its BLOOM.” And so we’re taken through revelry in the Christmas season: “Sorrows, begone! / Life and its ills, / Duns and their bills, / Bid we to flee.”

The Mahogany Tree
by William Makepeace Thackeray

Christmas is here;
Winds whistle shrill,
Icy and chill,
Little care we;
Little we fear
Weather without,
Shelter’d about
The Mahogany Tree.

Once on the boughs
Birds of rare plume
Sang, in its bloom;
Night birds are we;
Here we carouse,
Singing, like them,
Perch’d round the stem
Of the jolly old tree.

Here let us sport,
Boys, as we sit —
Laughter and wit
Flashing so free.
Life is but short —
When we are gone,
Let them sing on,
Round the old tree.

Evenings we knew,
Happy as this;
Faces we miss,
Pleasant to see.
Kind hearts and true,
Gentle and just,
Peace to your dust!
We sing round the tree.

Care, like a dun,
Lurks at the gate:
Let the dog wait;
Happy we’ll be!
Drink every one;
Pile up the coals,
Fill the red bowls,
Round the old tree.

Drain we the cup. —
Friend, art afraid?
Spirits are laid
In the Red Sea.
Mantle it up;
Empty it yet;
Let us forget,
Round the old tree.

Sorrows, begone!
Life and its ills,
Duns and their bills,
Bid we to flee.
Come with the dawn,
Blue-devil sprite,
Leave us to-night,
Round the old tree.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.