Sorrows of Werther
Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady,
And a moral man was Werther,
And, for all the wealth of Indies,
Would do nothing for to hurt her.
So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more was by it troubled.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
Commentary
As a poem, this doesn’t really need much said about it. The reference is to Goethe’s ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, a work that apparently inspired a lot of poems1, though it’s a pretty safe bet none of them took quite the tone of Thackeray’s piece.
Note: I couldn’t find a synopsis of ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ anywhere, but the following is a synopsis of Massenet’s opera based on the novel: http://www.laopera.org/98-99/werthersynopsis.htm. The poem is a nicer if not as accurate summary, though <g>.
Biography
Thackeray, William Makepeace
b. July 18, 1811, Calcutta, India
d. Dec. 24, 1863, London, Eng.
English novelist whose reputation rests chiefly on Vanity Fair (1847-48), a novel of the Napoleonic period in England, and The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852), set in the early 18th century.
See http://www.infoplease.com/ce5/CE051388.html for a full biography.
Assessment
In his own time Thackeray was regarded as the only possible rival to Dickens. His pictures of contemporary life were obviously real and were accepted as such by the middle classes. A great professional, he provided novels, stories, essays, and verses for his audience, and he toured as a nationally known lecturer. He wrote to be read aloud in the long Victorian family evenings, and his prose has the lucidity, spontaneity, and pace of good reading material. Throughout his works, Thackeray analyzed and deplored snobbery and frequently gave his opinions on human behaviour and the shortcomings of society, though usually prompted by his narrative to do so. He examined such subjects as hypocrisy, secret emotions, the sorrows sometimes attendant on love, remembrance of things past, and the vanity of much of life–such moralizing being, in his opinion, an important function of the novelist. He had little time for such favourite devices of Victorian novelists as exaggerated characterization and melodramatic plots, preferring in his own work to be more true to life, subtly depicting various moods and plunging the reader into a stream of entertaining narrative, description, dialogue, and comment.
Thackeray’s high reputation as a novelist continued unchallenged to the end of the 19th century but then began to decline. Vanity Fair is still his most interesting and readable work and has retained its place among the great historical novels in the English language.
– EB
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see http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/dictionary/16smithM1.html for example. ↩
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Abraham Thomas · 21 August 1999
Goethe’s novel, of course, is the canonical example of ‘Bildungsroman’ - literally, ‘education novel’ - a work which traces the moral and psychological growth of the protagonist. And it’s actually pretty good (as such things go). That the sensitive and refined Werther would later become the inspiration for countless effusions of Victorian sentimentality is ironic in the extreme - Goethe himself was anything but a Romantic :-).
Vince · 27 June 2003
Goethe was a romantic, and classical and whatever he wanted to be. There were several suicides inspired by Werther. I read the book (in English). The funniest thing in it was Charlotte and Werther, looking out of a window watching a storm gathering over the hills, sunset & clouds and lightening. Werther takes Charlotte’s hand in his and says: “Klopstock”! ( referring to a Romantic poet). Vince Butler