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Some years back, The
California Writers
Club received a
grant to send a few
writers into
elementary schools
in my area, and I
spent some time
introducing fifth
graders to poetry.
My mission was to
help them fall in
love with the art,
so I concentrated on performance,
trying to make each
of the poems I
presented an
entertaining
experience.
Too often elementary
and high school
teachers turn
students off by
treating poems as
puzzles, demanding
their attention be
mostly directed
towards trying to
figure out what
the poem means. Treated
as an enigma rather
than a pleasurable
experience, poetry
can feel threatening
to young readers or
listeners.
Of the dozens of
poems I presented,
Lewis Carroll's
Jabberwocky was
consistently the
thumbs-up favorite
with my
ten-year-olds.
But wait a minute.
If burdening the
young with the task
of trying to figure
out what a poem
means can be a
turn-off, why would
they fall in love
with a poem in which
27 of its nouns,
verbs, adjectives,
and exclamations are
enigmatic coinages
without apparent
meaning? Brillig,
slithy, toves, gyre,
gimble, wabe, mimsy,
borogoves, mome,
raths, outgrabe,
jabberwock, jubjub,
frumious,
bandersnatch,
uffish, vorpal,
manxome, tumtum,
tulgey, whiffling,
burbled, galumphing,
frabjous, callooh,
callay, chortled. What are we to make of such language?
Jabberwocky is the
greatest nonsense
poem in English. One
of the pleasures of
the genre is that it
liberates us from
the obligation to
worry about meaning.
Carroll's nonsense
words with their
bold, confident
consonantal sounds
are exhilarating to
say out loud. All we
really need to know
about "slithy,"
"mimsy," "frumious,"
"uffish," "vorpal,"
"manxome," "tulgey"
and "frabjous" is
that they are
adjectives that
mysteriously modify
sometimes equally
mysterious nouns
(toves, borogoves,
Bandersnatch) and
sometimes common
words we do know
(thought, blade,
foe, wood, day). We
feel the primitive
purity of adjectival
force
itself—the
activity of
modification
independent of how
it specifically
modifies.
It's a delight to
feel liberated from
the obligation to
fully comprehend,
especially when we
get the general
drift of a story
being told. Alice,
who finds
Jabberwocky "RATHER
hard to understand,"
hilariously
over-summarizes its
plot as indicating
no more than "SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING."
Carroll, of course,
offers more than
that, creating a
poetic x-ray of a
narrative dynamic
some of my fifth
graders may have
already encountered
via Grimm fairy
tales such as "The
White Snake," The
Water of Life," "The
Brave Little Tailor"
or in stories from
other fairy tale and
folk tale compilers.
The details vary,
but basically a
youngest son goes
forth to seek his
fortune and meets an
old man along the
way who asks for
food or makes other
requests which the
boy's elder and
unsuccessful
brothers have
refused to honor.
The younger brother
indulges the old man
who offers valuable
advice or magical
charms that help him
discover and
neutralize a giant,
dragon, or ogre
that's been plaguing
the land. The
youngest brother
triumphs; is
sometimes wed to his
country's princess
as a reward; and the
story always
concludes with a
great celebration.
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My fifth graders may or may not have read one or more of the
fairy tales that Carroll's x-ray illuminates, but I know that
emotionally they felt the danger, the bravery, the battle, the
triumph of the conquest, and the joy of the wild festivities that
followed. They also likely basked in the parental pride that the
old man showered on the representative of their own generation.
They were liberated into the essence of the story that Carroll's
penetrating x-ray created for them. ("Just the essence, Ma'am,
just the essence, that's all poetry requires," I hear Joe Friday
murmur.)
****
Jabberwocky has become so famous as a standalone poem that we
can almost forget that it is part of Through the Looking-Glass, one of a dozen poems that Alice already knows or will encounter
for the first time before her dream ends. Although she reads
Jabberwocky to herself after reversing its originally unreadable
text in a mirror, the other poems are recited to her by
Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, The White Knight, and the Red
Queen.
Alice finds the The Walrus and the Carpenter "easier" than
Jabberwocky. It's a straight, detailed narrative in which the title
characters lure baby oysters out of the sea, promising a lovely
walk on the beach that results in their being callously devoured.
Alice has no problem with the poem's meaning but, seduced by
oysters anthropomorphized as little children, she is quite
disturbed by their not unexpected fate. She ventures an opinion:
"I like the Walrus best, because he was a LITTLE sorry for the
poor oysters." Tweedledee, however, crushes her by pointing out
that "He ate more than the Carpenter." When Alice then says she
prefers the Carpenter because he ate less than the Walrus,
Tweedledee shoots her down again with, "But he ate as many as
he could get." Poetry Alice feels presents "a puzzler," a no-win
situation. All she can say is "They were BOTH very unpleasant
characters."
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More significant is Alice's encounter with the self-proclaimed
literary critic and epitome of pride, Humpty Dumpty, who tells
her "I can explain all the poems that were ever invented—and a
good many that haven't been invented just yet."
Alice asks Humpty what the puzzling words in Jabberwocky
mean. He explains that "slithy" and "mimsy" are "portmanteau"
words that pack "two meanings up into one word" ("lithe" and
"slimy" become "slithy"; "flimsy" and "miserable" become
"mimsy"). According to Humpty, "toves" "are something like
badgers—they're something like lizards—and they're something
like corkscrews" and "they make their nests under sun dials." "To
"Gyre" is to go round and round like a gyroscope" and "to gimble
is to make holes like a gimlet."
For the first time, Alice becomes excited by poetry, adding that
"The wabe is the grass plot round a sun-dial, I suppose,"
"surprised by her own ingenuity." Humpty notes that "it's called
"wabe, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind
it," and Alice adds: "And a long way beyond it on each side." It's
delightful to suddenly perceive meaning where one was stumped
before. Humpty Dumpty turns poems into puzzles which are
always fun if you can solve them. Alice challenges Humpty,
however, when he tyrannically insists that he is the master of
words and can make them mean whatever he wants. "The
question is," said Alice, "whether you CAN make words mean so
many different things."
Wanting to be on her way, Alice feels she must listen to Humpty
recite a poem, because he assures her that it "was written entirely
for your amusement." It turns out to be a meaningless word salad,
repeatedly claiming to make sense while declining to do so and
concluding with a couplet that leaves Alice totally up in the air:
And when I found the door was shut
/
I tried to turn the
handle, but—
Alice is next subjected to a recitation by The White Knight of a
poem with multiple titles. The "name of the song" is called
"Haddock's Eyes," the Knight asserts, "but that's just what the
name is called." The name really is "The Aged Aged Man." As a
"song," however, it's called "Ways and Means," but "that's only
what it's called." "Well, what IS the song, then," said Alice, who
was by this time completely bewildered. "The song really is "A
-Sitting on a Gate." The poem's speaker never gets more than
absurd answers to the fundamental question he repeats again and
again to the aged man sitting on a gate: "How is it you live?"
About to be treated to yet another meaningless poem from The
Red Queen, Alice observes that "I've had such a quantity of poetry
repeated to me to-day… and it's a very curious thing, I
think—every poem was about fish in some way."
Fish are slippery, hard to get hold of, denizens of a non-human
environment, always swimming away from us—so are an apt
metaphor for Alice's difficulty in "grasping" the meaning of
poems she must reluctantly attend to. Carroll portrays Alice as a
child who has fallen into a world where language itself is slippery.
Alice does find Jabberwocky entertaining, despite what Humpty
Dumpty calls its "hard words," and she is fascinated by The
Walrus and the Carpenter's narrative, despite its moral ambiguity.
She doesn't get to weigh in on the meaning of Humpty Dumpty's
poem, however, so I'll close with part of the speaker's
conversation with some "little fishes" that I suspect left Alice
puzzled:
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