Today’s Poem: Vanitas Vanitatum

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

Gustave Doré, etching of King Solomon, 1866 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

Vanitas Vanitatum

by William Makepeace Thackeray

O Vanity of vanities!
     How wayward the decrees of Fate are;
How very weak the very wise,
     How very small the very great are!

What mean these stale moralities,
     Sir Preacher, from your desk you mumble?
Why rail against the great and wise,
     And tire us with your ceaseless grumble?

Pray choose us out another text,
     O man morose and narrow-minded!
Come turn the page — I read the next,
     And then the next, and still I find it.

Read here how Wealth aside was thrust,
     And Folly set in place exalted;
How Princes footed in the dust,
     While lackeys in the saddle vaulted.

Though thrice a thousand years are past,
     Since David’s son, the sad and splendid,
The weary King Ecclesiast,
     Upon his awful tablets penned it, —

Methinks the text is never stale,
     And life is every day renewing
Fresh comments on the old old tale
     Of Folly, Fortune, Glory, Ruin.

Hark to the Preacher, preaching still
     He lifts his voice and cries his sermon,
Here at St. Peter’s of Cornhill,
     As yonder on the Mount of Hermon;

For you and me to heart to take
      (O dear beloved brother readers)
To-day as when the good King spake
     Beneath the solemn Syrian cedars.

---

Unlike his contemporary Charles Dickens — whose comic “Ode to an Expiring Frog,” from the pages of the Pickwick Papers, we ran earlier this summer — the university-educated novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) wrote a considerable amount of poetry, enough to fill a thick volume in his collected works.  

Matching the author’s prose, much of his poetry is sardonic, as in “Persicos Odi,” or straightforward comedy, as in “A Tragic Story,” while some is sentimental, as with “The Cane-Bottom’d Chair.” His yuletide festival song, “The Mahogany Tree,” deserves reviving as Christmas verse.

In “Vanitas Vanitatum,” however (here in its second part), Thackeray gives a curious production. Its prooftext is the Book of Ecclesiastes, which famously opens:

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem:
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

Ecclesiastes is one of the books of the Bible that translates particularly well into English, which may be why so many novel titles have been drawn from its phrases. In “Vanitas Vanitatum,” Thackeray presents the received view of Ecclesiastes as a grim and dismal recounting of the destined failure and unlastingness of human ambition. O Vanity of vanities!

He follows a strange course to the end, however, beginning with the feminine (i.e., two-syllable) rhymes in the second and fourth lines of each quatrain — which is, often enough, a comic device, as with Thackeray’s lightfooted “splendid” and “penned it” in the fifth stanza.

Even the narrative of the poem is hardly high-toned. A man puts forward the theme of Ecclesiastes in the first stanza, only to have his interlocutor mock him in the second stanza as “Sir Preacher,” who tires us “with your ceaseless grumble.”

The original speaker returns in the fifth stanza to say the fairly conventional thing, that Ecclesiastes speaks eternal truths as relevant today in St Peter upon Cornhill (a Wren church in London) as it was in ancient times on Mount Hermon, on the border between Lebanon and Syria. Solomon spoke wisely then, and he speaks wisely now.

Frank T. Merrill’s 1891 illustration of Thackeray in his cane-bottom'd Chair

As I said, fairly conventional for Thackeray’s Victorian England. But with that O dear beloved brother readers in the final stanza, we learn that the speaker of grim truths, the one who has taken to heart the lesson of Ecclesiastes, is Thackeray himself. There is no new thing under the sun.

---

---