Poem of Day: ‘The Mahogany Tree’

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.”