John Gay (1685–1732) conceived his 1728 “ballad opera,” The Beggar’s Opera, as a satire, rather than the “Newgate pastoral” originally proposed by his friend Jonathan Swift. Peopled by thieves, thugs, and prostitutes with surnames like “Trull,” “Vixen,” “Tawdry,” and “Brazen,” the Beggar’s Opera lampooned the contemporary upper-crust taste for opera in the Italian style. It was believed to have made a particular target, too, of the Whig Party luminary Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Oxford, who suppressed performances of Gay’s 1729 sequel, Polly. This common-meter “Song,” an ironic ditty on life’s fleeting joys, sung by the criminal protagonist Macheath and a “girls’ chorus” of Trulls, Vixens, Tawdries, and Brazens, is set to a popular dance tune of the day, the “Cotillion.” 

Song: Youth’s the Season Made for Joys
by John Gay

Youth’s the season made for joys,
Love is then our duty:
She alone who that employs,
Well deserves her beauty.
Let’s be gay
While we may,
Beauty’s a flower despised in decay.

Let us drink and sport to-day,
Ours is not to-morrow:
Love with youth flies swift away,
Age is naught but sorrow.
Dance and sing,
Time’s on the wing,
Life never knows the return of spring.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.