Broadway’s New Season: ‘A Few Good Men,’ a Singing Galileo, and a Dolly Parton Musical
By ELYSA GARDNER
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In Thackeray’s day, it was hard for writers not to dash off some poetry, if only because of the reading public’s knowledge of the art.
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William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was a novelist, of course — much faded from the esteem in which he was once held, back in the days that thought him second only to Dickens as an author of great Victorian novels. Still, his “Vanity Fair” is remembered, as are “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” and perhaps “The Newcomes.”
In those days, however, it was hard for writers not to dash off some poetry, if only because of the reading public’s knowledge of the art. And Thackeray’s occasional verse, scattered through his works, ended up running 235 pages when collected, after his death, in an 1869 volume called “Ballads and Tales.”
The most anthologized is probably “Vanitas Vanitatum,” but for a lighter Wednesday here at The New York Sun, it’s worth remembering “A Tragic Story,” his English reworking of “’s war einer, dem’s zu Herzen ging,” a comic song by the Greman polymath Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838). In stanzas mostly with a triple tetrameter rhyme, followed by a trimeter sting ending with “behind him,” the poem tells the tragic tale of a man who could not get his pigtail to hang in front, no matter how fast he twirled around.
By ELYSA GARDNER
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By CARL ROLLYSON
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By ROSS ANDERSON
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
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By BENNY AVNI
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By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
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By ALEX ZDAN
|William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was a novelist, of course — much faded from the esteem in which he was once held, back in the days that thought him second only to Dickens as an author of great Victorian novels. Still, his “Vanity Fair” is remembered, as are “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” and perhaps “The Newcomes.”
In those days, however, it was hard for writers not to dash off some poetry, if only because of the reading public’s knowledge of the art. And Thackeray’s occasional verse, scattered through his works, ended up running 235 pages when collected, after his death, in an 1869 volume called “Ballads and Tales.”
The most anthologized is probably “Vanitas Vanitatum,” but for a lighter Wednesday here at The New York Sun, it’s worth remembering “A Tragic Story,” his English reworking of “’s war einer, dem’s zu Herzen ging,” a comic song by the Greman polymath Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838). In stanzas mostly with a triple tetrameter rhyme, followed by a trimeter sting ending with “behind him,” the poem tells the tragic tale of a man who could not get his pigtail to hang in front, no matter how fast he twirled around.
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