Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for the fourteen comic operas (known as the Savoy operas) produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado. In 1890, Gilbert produced Songs of a Savoyard, (the source of this Weekly Poem), a volume of sixty-nine detached lyrics from the Savoy Operas, each with a new title, and some of them slightly reworded to account for the changed context. - Summary by Wikipedia