The Shapes of Sound, part five

This poem by Lewis Carroll may be the most famous nonsense poem in English. On first glance, it appears to be gibberish: it’s full of made-up words and words put together from unrelated words. Some of it doesn’t even seem to be in English.

That’s what Alice thought – she of Through the Looking Glass fame – when she first read it. “It seems very pretty,” she said to herself, “but it’s rather hard to understand! . . . Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate –”

Alice was right. It is a story about a young boy who manages to vanquish the dreaded Jabberwock. She figured it out because Carroll cleverly imitated elements of English words to create new words. And he followed the proper subject-predicate sequences; nouns sound like nouns, adjectives like adjectives, and verbs like verbs. The context provides the meaning for what appears to be an absurdity.

Wordplay can be such fun.

JABBERWOCKY

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

~ Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), pseudonym of Charles Dodgson, English writer and mathematician