Poetry Codex

Victorian

William Makepeace Thackeray

1811–1863

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was born in Calcutta and is best known as the novelist of Vanity Fair, but he was also a prolific writer of comic verse. Much of it first appeared in Punch in the 1840s and early 1850s, including the 'Policeman X' ballads in comic cockney dialect, often under the name Titmarsh.

The poems here are the ones James Parton chose for his anthology The Humorous Poetry of the English Language.

Poems (83)

  1. The Bachelor's Cane-Bottomed Chair
  2. The King of Brentford's Testament
  3. Titmarsh's Carmen Lilliense
  4. Sorrows of Werther
  5. The Yankee Volunteers
  6. Jacob Omnium's Hoss
  7. The Wofle New Ballad of Jane Roney and Mary Brown
  8. The Ballad of Eliza Davis
  9. Lines on a Late Hospicious Ewent
  10. The Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch
  11. The Crystal Palace
  12. The Chronicle of the Drum
  13. Abd-el-Kader at Toulon; or, The Caged Hawk
  14. The White Squall
  15. Peg of Limavaddy
  16. May-Day Ode
  17. The Ballad of Bouillabaisse
  18. The Mahogany Tree
  19. The Pen and the Album
  20. Mrs. Katherine's Lantern
  21. Lucy's Birthday
  22. Piscator and Piscatrix
  23. The Rose upon My Balcony
  24. Ronsard to His Mistress
  25. At the Church Gate
  26. The Age of Wisdom
  27. A Doe in the City
  28. The Last of May
  29. "Ah, Bleak and Barren Was the Moor"
  30. Song of the Violet
  31. Fairy Days
  32. Pocahontas
  33. From Pocahontas
  34. What Makes My Heart to Thrill and Glow? (The Mayfair Love-Song)
  35. The Ghazul, or Oriental Love-Song: The Rocks
  36. The Caïque
  37. My Nora
  38. To Mary
  39. Serenade
  40. The Minaret Bells
  41. Come to the Greenwood Tree
  42. A Tragic Story
  43. The Chaplet
  44. The King on the Tower
  45. On a Very Old Woman
  46. A Credo
  47. The King of Yvetot
  48. The King of Brentford (Another Version)
  49. The Garret
  50. Jolly Jack
  51. Ad Ministram
  52. The Knightly Guerdon
  53. The Almack's Adieu
  54. When the Gloom Is on the Glen
  55. The Red Flag
  56. Dear Jack
  57. Commanders of the Faithful
  58. When Moonlike ore the Hazure Seas
  59. King Canute
  60. Friar's Song
  61. Atra Cura
  62. Requiescat
  63. Lines upon My Sister's Portrait
  64. The Legend of St. Sophia of Kioff
  65. The Willow-Tree
  66. The Willow-Tree (Another Version)
  67. The Pimlico Pavilion
  68. Molony's Lament
  69. Mr. Molony's Account of the Ball Given to the Nepaulese Ambassador by the Peninsular and Oriental Company
  70. The Battle of Limerick
  71. Larry O'Toole
  72. The Rose of Flora
  73. The Last Irish Grievance
  74. The Three Christmas Waits
  75. Damages, Two Hundred Pounds
  76. The Knight and the Lady
  77. The Speculators
  78. A Woeful New Ballad of the Protestant Conspiracy to Take the Pope's Life
  79. The Organ-Boy's Appeal
  80. Little Billee
  81. The End of the Play
  82. Vanitas Vanitatum
  83. The Three Sailors

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