Episode 76
Jabberwocky by
Lewis Carroll 

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/76_Jabberwocky_by_Lewis_Carrol.mp3












Poet

Lewis Carroll

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness



























Jabberwocky

by Lewis Carroll

’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.

Podcast transcript

This is one of the most famous nonsense poems ever written. You’ve probably heard it already. And you probably already know that it’s famous for being full of invented words that dazzle and beguile its readers. Yet somehow, we are able to make sense of the nonsense.

But is it really full of made-up words? And is it really so surprising that we can follow it?

Imagine if the poem had begun with the second stanza:

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

What would you make of this opening? You’d probably wonder what a frumious Bandersnatch was. But the rest of it would be pretty obvious from the context. The Jabberwock is clearly some kind of monster, with jaws that bite and claws that catch. The Jubjub bird is a species of bird – you wouldn’t know what kind, but unless you’re an ornithologist, there are plenty of exotic birds in this world that you’ve never heard of, so you’d mentally file it with the rest of them.

Out of the twenty-two words in the stanza, only four of them are invented. So the opening wouldn’t be hard to follow, even if you were curious to know more. The same goes for the next stanza:

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.

Out of twenty six words, only three are invented. So the language wouldn’t be a showstopper: we might wander what a vorpal sword looks like, or exactly what makes a foe manxome, or how big a Tumtum tree is. But none of this would hinder us following the action. And the same goes for the next three stanzas – the invented words are eye-catching, but there aren’t that many of them.

So the secret hiding in plain sight is that most of ‘Jabberwocky’ isn’t that difficult to understand. No more difficult than a passage from Tolkien that mentions elves and dwarves and names like Mordor and Minas Tirith. If it weren’t for that spectacular opening stanza, the poem probably wouldn’t have such a reputation for outrageous use of language.

But I think you’ll agree it’s quite the opening:

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

Out of twenty three words, there are ten invented words, and one dictionary word, ‘gyre’, that was such an obscure word in 1851, when the first version of the poem was written, that it might as well have been made up. It was certainly rare enough for Carroll to feel he needed to write a note explaining that it should be pronounced with a hard ‘g’. Later on it was a favourite word of W. B. Yeats, and I can’t help wondering whether Yeats first noticed it in ‘Jabberwocky’.

Anyway. That means there are 11 strange words out of 23 in this opening stanza, almost half the stanza, so no wonder it feels like it’s chock-full of strangeness. And in the other five stanzas, there are only 18 more invented words in total, so they are spread much thinner through the rest of the poem.

It’s like buying one of those sandwiches that has been cut in two: on the shelf, it looks like it’s chock full of delicious filling, but when you unwrap it you discover that the edges are mostly bread and butter.

And I want to stress, this isn’t a criticism. Well, it’s a criticism of the sandwich. But it’s praise for the poem. Because whatever else it is, ‘Jabberwocky’ is also an example of a master illusionist at work, using all the linguistic and imaginative resources he can muster to achieve maximum effect with minimal effort.

Having so many strange words in the opening stanza makes a first impression that is so ostentatiously rich and strange that it stamps itself indelibly on our memory, and influences our perception of the rest of the poem. And repeating the stanza at the end of the poem means that our final impression of the poem is the same as the first one – of a dense and beguiling forest of words that we have somehow managed to wander through without getting lost.

As a practising poet I am in awe of Lewis Carroll’s skill in creating this illusion. So let’s take a closer look at how he does it…

So firstly, the poem is very short. Just six stanzas, and one of them is repeated. So he only really has to dazzle us with one really dense and clever stanza. The rest of the poem can have just enough strangeness to maintain the illusion.

Secondly, the action is really simple: a hero goes into a forest, kills a monster and comes back in triumph. It’s an archetypal scenario that even children – especially children – are very familiar with, from fairy stories and legends. So there’s not much chance of us losing the thread of the plot.

On top of this, Carroll uses rhythm and rhyme in a skilfully entrancing way. It’s written in a kind of ballad stanza, with three tetrameters, four-beat lines, followed by a final trimeter, a line with only three beats. And there’s lots of alliteration (repeated consonants), assonance (repeated vowels) and internal rhyme (rhyme within a line instead of at the end of the line). All of which has a spellbinding effect, lulling our conscious mind into a perhaps false sense of lucidity. Clive James once said that W. H. Auden’s poetic skill could make anything sound ‘truer than true’, and I think there’s a similar effect going on here.

Another thing Carroll is very clever about is the types of invented words that he uses. In the first stanza there are two invented verbs, ‘gimble’ and ‘outgrabe’, and that unusual word, ‘gyre’:

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

So because the verbs are so strange, it’s really hard to figure out exactly what’s going on in this stanza, and some scholars are still debating it. Which means the reader feels quite disoriented on reading this, but it doesn’t really matter, because nothing crucial is happening here. It’s what film directors call an establishing shot – a camera shot that sets the scene by showing us the environment in which the action will take place. It’s scenery. So it’s fine, in fact it’s desirable, that we feel a little disoriented and giddy, as if we’ve just stepped onto a fairground ride.

But when the action starts, Carroll doesn’t take this kind of risk. In the rest of the poem there are only three more invented verbs: ‘whiffling’, ‘galumphing’, and ‘chortled’, plus the obscure verb ‘burbled’, which are all pretty easy to understand from the context. So at the crucial moments in the action, the verbs make it nice and clear what’s happening: the hero ‘took’ his sword, he ‘sought’ the foe, he ‘rested’ by the Tumtum tree, he ‘stood’ awhile in thought, and he ‘left’ the Jabberwock dead.

Have a listen to the verbs in the central three stanzas:

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.

It’s nice and clear what’s happening, isn’t it? Even ‘galumphing’ is close enough to ‘galloping’ to be understood at a first reading. There are still a decent number of strange words, but notice that these are mostly adjectives: the ‘vorpal’ sword, the ‘manxome’ foe, ‘uffish’ thought, the ‘tulgey’ wood. So even if we’re not sure what they mean, we never lose the thread because the nouns are all clear: a sword, a foe, the hero’s thought, and the wood.

There is of course one very important noun at the heart of the poem: ‘the Jabberwock’ itself. But we’re given a lot of information about the Jabberwock in plain English: it has jaws that bite and claws that catch and eyes of flame. So it’s obviously a monster of some kind, and as all monster movie directors know, the monster you don’t quite see is the scariest monster of all, because you fill in the details with your imagination.

There’s also a terrific piece of onomatopoeia, words designed to imitate sounds, at the climax of the action:

       The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

It’s like a cartoon, isn’t it? We really hear and see the sword despatch the Jabberwock with a swift one-two.

And there are also some wonderful invented words used to express the speaker’s delight at the hero’s success:

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

So we’ve got another adjective here, ‘beamish’, and the connotations of ‘beaming’ are pretty obviously appropriate in this context. And then that delightful line:

       O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

So no problems here: these are wonderfully exuberant exclamations. And we’re all used to yelling strange words at moments of triumph, as anyone will attest who has ever shouted ‘yippee!’, ‘hooray!’, ‘yee-haw!’ or ‘hup hup huzzah!’.

We never find out who this speaker is, who first warns the hero to ‘beware the Jabberwock, my son’, and then celebrates his return. Perhaps it’s a proud parent, or perhaps ‘my son’ is just a term of affection. But dramatically of course, an audience is required for any self-respecting hero.

So Lewis Carroll is a very clever poet, not just in his ability to invent words, but also the way he artfully deploys these new words, front-loading the poem with lots of them, but measuring them out judiciously in the middle. And using invented verbs when he doesn’t mind confusing us, but mostly adjectives when he wants us to follow the action.

Another way he gets away with so much nonsense is in the delightfully suggestive sound of the words. We’ve got the onomatopoeia of ‘snicker-snack’, as well as ‘whiffling’, ‘burbled’ and ‘chortled’. And also words that are suggestive of other words: ‘slithy’, as Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, means ‘lithe and slimy’; ‘fruminious’, according to Carroll himself, combines ‘fuming’ and ‘furious’; ‘gimble’ suggests ‘nimble’; ‘mimsy’ suggests ‘flimsy’, and so on.

In his massive book about how poetry works, The Poem, Don Paterson talks about the role of phonesthemes in poetry. His definition of a phonestheme is ‘a point of sound-sense coincidence’. In other words, it’s where we find a cluster of words that sound similar, and which have similar or related meanings, even though there might be no etymological connection, in terms of the history of the words. For example, the sound ‘gl’ occurs in words describing sight or reflected light, such as glisten, glare, glow, glint, gleam, glass, glance, glitter and so on.

Poets love this kind of thing, because it gives them plenty to work with. One definition of poetry could be the art of marrying the sound of words with their sense. So Lewis Carroll was a highly skilled poet. And no wonder that when Alice comes across this poem in the novel Through the Looking-Glass, she says:

‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are.’

Another aspect of language that I think Carroll exploits really well is the tendency of the human mind to fill in the gaps in perception to help us navigate the world, and gaps in language when we’re reading a challenging text.

You may recall the internet meme years ago, that pointed out that we can often understand words whose letters have been scrambled, as long as the first and last words are in the correct position. And we’re all familiar with the experience of reading a book and finding an unfamiliar word – do you bother to look it up? Or can you guess the meaning from the context? Often, guessing feels easier than the effort of looking it up.

This is part of the experience of learning to read, as I’m currently rediscovering in my quest to learn Japanese. I often find myself looking at a Japanese sentence with one or two words I don’t know. It reminds me of what it was like when I was a child and wanted to keep reading a story, rather than looking new words up in the dictionary, so I did my best to figure out new words for myself.

All of which is to say, that there are qualities inherent in language that make it possible for us to derive a kind of sense from even the weirdest of words, and Carroll knew this, or intuited it, and managed to tread the finest of lines between sense and nonsense when he wrote ‘Jabberwocky’.

Zooming out from individual words to the poem as a whole, we can see that the structure of the poem is also key to its effect. We’ve already noted the hypnotic effect of the regular metre and stanza form. And if we look at the content of the stanzas, we can see that they are neatly symmetrical:

Firstly, we have that establishing shot of the opening stanza:

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

Then the mysterious speaker appears to warn our hero about the monster:

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

Next we get three stanzas of action, right in the middle of the poem:

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.

After that, the final two stanzas are a mirror image of the first two. So in the second-to-last stanza, the speaker of the second stanza reappears:

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

And finally, as we know, Carroll repeats the first stanza, so that we end our journey where we began, as if the spell has been lifted, and we find ourselves in the same place where we began, but with the sense of having been somehow transported:

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

Given that Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, we can assume this symmetry is no accident. In fact, this kind of structure is quite common in storytelling, it’s called a nested loop, because different elements or storyline nested inside another, so that you go deeper into the structure, then back out again. It’s used in works as diverse as the movies Pulp Fiction and Inception, and the British children’s TV show Bagpuss.

I learned the technique when I was a hypnotherapist – because nesting different stories or levels of stories inside each other has a disorienting effect on conscious mind, so that with each new level, the subject goes deeper into a trance state. And there’s definitely something a little trancelike going on ‘Jabberwocky’. Especially when we remember that Carroll placed the poem inside a longer story, the novel Through the Looking-Glass.

Alice finds a book written in a strange script, and it’s only when she remembers that she’s in a looking-glass world that she realises it’s printed in reverse, so she needs to look at the pages in a mirror to read them. So what we have is a poem reflected in a mirror inside a story about a world inside a looking-glass that turns out to be a dream. And the poem itself is written in a symmetrical form where the beginning mirrors the end. Which makes it one more level in the seemingly endless levels of the Alice books.

So the cumulative effect of Carroll’s various techniques – inventing suggestive new words, placing them artfully where they will have the greatest effect, exploiting quirks of language and tricks of perception, structuring the poem and the novel like a hall of mirrors, and using rhyme and other sound patterns to heighten the effect – is of a master illusionist at work.

He uses music and misdirection and to a dazzling effect that is somehow also flattering to us as readers. On the one hand the poem is bafflingly strange, but on the other, we can somehow make perfect sense of it! Curiouser and curioser, as Alice might say. Or if you ask me, cleverer and cleverer.

And I really don’t intend to spoil the magic by point out the cleverness of the poem’s construction. Because for me at least, this is a magic trick that still works even when you know how it works. I’ve enumerated different techniques, but the real magic of the poem – and maybe of poetry itself – is the way they all work mysteriously together, and create something greater than the sum of its parts. Something that almost feels alive.

So let’s hear the poem again and enjoy the sensation of being lost in a forest of strange words, but somehow able to see the wood for the trees.

 

Jabberwocky

by Lewis Carroll

’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

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English author, mathematician, logician, and photographer who was born in 1832 and died in 1898. A lecturer at Oxford University, he excelled in mathematics and logic, publishing scholarly works under his real name. He is best known for his literary classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Carroll was also a pioneer in early photography and there is an ongoing controversy about some of his subject matter. He was a skilled writer of nonsense verse, and many of his poems appear inside his novels. His prose and verse are distinguished by a unique blend of logic and fantasy that has enchanted readers for generations. 

 

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.



























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