Disillusionised
31. She’s all my fancy painted her: See poem with this title (pp. 51–2).
First published College Rhymes, iii, 1862, pp. 129–30.
Those Horrid Hurdy-Gurdies!
The first line of each stanza (except the last) is from enduringly popular songs: “My mother bids me bind my hair” by Anne Hunter was set to music by Haydn; “My lodging” goes back to the seventeenth century and was adapted by Thomas Moore for his “Believe me if all those endearing young charms”; “Ever of Thee I’m fondly dreaming” seems to have been first published in the early 1850s. The organ grinder’s songs were endlessly repeated as he turned the handle of his hurdy-gurdy.
First published College Rhymes, iii, 1862, pp. 112–16. Reprinted in Three Sunsets.
[Prologue]
LC adapted this poem, first written in 1853 for a proposed volume of verse, as the Prologue to volume 4 of College Rhymes (1863).
The Majesty of Justice
The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University had his own court, not part of the general system of justice in the land. The dialogue in the poem satirically questions whether only ceremonial can ratify justice. R.W.G. was one of LC’s noms-de-plume.
First published College Rhymes, iv, 1863, pp. 96–9.
Miss Jones
This is a medley of twenty-two songs was written in 1862 at Croft together with LC’s sisters Margaret and Henrietta, the “tunes running into each other” (Diaries, iv, 139). Margaret listed the titles: “The Captain and his Whiskers”, “Willie we have missed you”, “Cherry Ripe”, “Kate’s Letter”, “Irish Emigrant”, “Annie Laurie”, “Irish Jig”, “Wait for the Waggon”, “Oft in the stilly night”, “Lucy Long”, “Reuben Wright”, “Oh charming May”, “Oh weel may the keel row”, “So early in the morning”, “Some love to reason”, “I gave my hand”, “I will marry my own love”, “The girl I left behind me”, “The perfect cure”, “the Minstrel boy”, “Beautiful Rhine”, “Rule Britannia” (reduced facsimile, Collected Verse, pp. 47–9). There was a hope that it would be performed at “the Egyptian Hall” in London, but this came to nothing.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
I have drawn on Handbook (1979) and Annotated Alice for much of the information concerning the parodies in the Alice books below.
[“All in the golden afternoon”]
These prefatory verses recall the river expeditions on 17 June and 4 July 1862 when LC began to invent what became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Diaries, iv, 81–2). The three Liddell sisters present were Lorina, aged thirteen (Prima), Alice, ten (Secunda), and Edith, eight (Tertia). Notice the change from present to past tense in stanza 5.
[“How doth the little crocodile”]
For the full text of the Isaac Watts poem “Against Idleness and Mischief ” from his Divine Songs for Children (1715), here parodied, see Introduction.
[Mouse Tails]
[“We lived beneath the mat”]
This poem appears in the original manuscript for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1886), and refers directly to cats, unlike the mouse’s tale below. Both mouse poems are set out as a tail.
[“Fury said to”]
The unjust trial presages the courtroom scene at the end of Wonderland.
[“ ‘You are old, Father William’, the young man said”]
A direct parody of Robert Southey’s didactic poem “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them” (1799), which begins:
“You are old, father William,” the young man cried,
“The few locks which are left you are grey;
You are hale, father William, a hearty old man,
Now tell me the reason I pray.”
“In the days of my youth,” father William replied,
“I remembered that youth would fly fast,
And abus’d not my health and my vigour at first,
That I never might need them at last.”
LC has picked up and exaggerated the energy implied in the cantering metre of the original.
[The Duchess’s Lullaby]
The Duchess’s “sort of lullaby” during which she “kept tossing the baby violently up and down” parodies a poem almost certainly by David Bates that became very popular after its (anonymous) appearance in Sharpe’s Magazine (1848): see Introduction. The unexceptionable advice in Bates’s poem becomes oddly menacing by repetition across nine verses: here are stanzas one and three:
Speak Gently! It is better far
To rule by love than fear;
Speak gently, let no harsh words mar
The good we might do here!
…
Speak gently to the little child!
Its love be sure to gain;
Teach it in accents soft and mild;
It may not long remain.
As Alice comments: “ ‘If I don’t take this child away with me,’ thought Alice ‘they’re sure to kill it in a day or two.’ ” See Introduction, p. xxx.
[“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat”]
The original poem by Jane Taylor, first published in Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), is one of the few that survive LC’s parody. The first of its five stanzas runs:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
[The Mock Turtle’s Song: I]
This poem parodies Mary Howitt’s “The Spider and the Fly”, based on an older song, in Sketches of Natural History (1834). Her fly in the first stanza shows the same canny demurring as LC’s snail:
“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the spider to the fly,
“ ’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy,
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I’ve got many curious things to show when you are there.”
“Oh, no, no,” said the little fly, “to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”
[The Mock Turtle’s Song in “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”]
In the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the Mock Turtle sings a different song: “Salmon come up!” a parody of a Negro Minstrel song that LC had heard the Liddell sisters sing on 3 July, the day before the river expedition that most immediately sparked Alice (Annotated Alice, p. 133). The chorus of that song begins:
Sally come up! Sally go down!
Sally come twist your heel around!
[“ ’Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare”]
In the Old Testament Song of Songs “the voice of the turtle” (2:10) means the turtle-dove; LC is here playing on the Mock Turtle’s presence, which seems to lie behind Alice’s elision of “turtle” to “lobster”. The poem parodies another of Isaac Watts’s didactic verses, “The Sluggard”, from his Divine Songs for Children, which begins:
’Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain,
“You have wak’d me too soon, I must slumber again.”
The third stanza runs:
I pass’d by his garden, and saw the wild brier,
The thorn and the thistle grow broader and higher;
The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags;
And his money still wastes as he starves or he begs.
LC fiddled with this parody a number of times. In 1870 he wrote an alternative stanza for William Boyd’s Songs from Alice in Wonderland:
I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the owl and the oyster were sharing a pie,
While the duck and the Dodo, the lizard and cat
Were swimming in milk round the brim of a hat.
The 1886 completion “eating the owl” (finishing the couplet in the text) appeared in Savile Clark’s operetta on Alice, while Stuart Collingwood’s biography offers:
But the panther obtained both the fork and the knife,
&nbs
p; So, when he lost his temper, the owl lost his life.
[The Mock Turtle’s Song: II]
Another song that the Liddell sisters sang is the basis for this parody: James M. Sayles’s “Star of the Evening” opens:
Beautiful star in heav’n so bright,
Softly falls thy silv’ry light,
As thou movest from earth afar,
Star of the evening, beautiful star.
Chorus: Beautiful star,
Beautiful star,
Star of the evening, beautiful star.
LC’s printed elongation of the words evokes the swoop of the soupy music.
[The White Rabbit’s Evidence]
Here LC adapts his own “She’s All My Fancy Painted Him”, and see also “Disillusionised”. William Mee’s song “Alice Gray” bemoans an impossible love and opens:
She’s all my fancy painted her,
She’s lovely, she’s divine,
But her heart it is another’s,
She never can be mine.
Yet loved I as man never loved,
A love without decay,
O, my heart, my heart is breaking
For the love of Alice Gray.
Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869)
[Part 1]
Phantasmagoria
The titles of the Cantos jokingly set medieval courtly speech and Gothic “horror” (customary for ghost stories) against the modern down-to-earth bonhomie and banter in the conversations between Ghost and Householder.
title I – The Trystyng: The Meeting.
title II – Hys Fyve Rules: Five Rules of Etiquette for Ghosts.
161. Tare and Tret: A weight allowance for packaging or dust, etc.; and an extra allowance.
title III – Scarmoges: Skirmishes.
231. Kobold: A German folklore apparition that can manifest as animal, object or human being.
241. Brocken: A Brocken spectre is a phenomenon of misty mountains when an enormous shadow seems to appear. The ghost found the mountain air too cold.
285. Ruskin: John Ruskin, the art critic who established the fashion for Gothic architecture. He was well known to LC (see Introduction); he appears also in “Hiawatha’s Photographing” (see line 74 and note).
title IV – Hys Nouryture: His Upbringing.
328. Bradshaw’s Guide: A guide to railway timetables and a favourite allusion for LC. See note to “Prologue to ‘La Guida di Bragia’ ”.
333–5. ‘Three little … toastesses’: “seven little ghostses … sitting on postses … eating buttered toastses” was a popular Hallowe’en song, which the ghost here claims to have invented.
411–14. Shakespeare … in sheets: “the sheeted dead/Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets” (Hamlet, i, 1, 115–16).
title V – Byckerment: A LC nonce word: bickering, quarrelling.
549–50. ‘The man … pocket!’: Dr Samuel Johnson is usually credited with this remark comparing punsters and pickpockets.
title VI – Dyscomfyture: Embarrassment, disappointment.
title VII – Sad Souvenaunce: Remembrance, nostalgia.
700. Coronach: A dirge played on bagpipes.
710. parallelepiped: A geometric solid whose six faces are parallelograms, a favourite with LC who jokingly suggested that one of his little sisters use it as the name for her rabbit, but here useful as an odd rhyme word.
Reprinted, with some variations, in Rhyme? And Reason?
A Valentine
14. dolorum omnium: Mors dolorum omnium exsolutio est: Death is the resolution of all woes (Seneca, De Consolatione, XIX, 5).
32. “Jonson’s learned sock be on”: John Milton, “L’Allegro”, line 131.
The original version was copied into Mischmasch.
A Sea Dirge
22. “thoughts … free”: From Lord Byron, The Corsair, Canto 1, stanza 1:
O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!
Carroll ruefully changes the triumphalism of Byron into sea-sickness.
27–8. B sharp … natural C: On the piano keyboard the note B sharp is the same pitch (and ivory key) as C natural. So C becomes sea and the rest follows in this argument.
First published College Rhymes, ii, October 1860, pp. 56–8.
Ye Carpette Knyghte
A clothes horse, a saddle of mutton and a bit of rhyme instead of the chivalric accoutrements of the knight cavalier, all disguised in mock-medieval spelling.
First published Train, i, March 1856, p. 191.
Hiawatha’s Photographing
The metre is identical both in the quietly comic introduction and in the poem itself with that of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic The Song of Hiawatha (1855), for example:
Thus departed Hiawatha
To the land of the Dacotahs,
To the land of handsome women;
Striding over moor and meadow,
Through interminable forests,
Through uninterrupted silence.
The trochaic tetrameters lope along easily and are based on the Finnish poem Kalevala. Longfellow’s poem draws on Native American legends; LC’s on English bourgeois life viewed through a sceptical camera’s lens. LC was an early adept of photography and he includes in this version of the poem three stanzas (lines 16–33) that precisely describe the laborious processes necessary, while brilliantly conforming to the demands of the metre. In 1856, the year before LC wrote this poem, Mary Cowden Clark (under the pseudonym Harry Wandsworth Shortfellow) published a parody, The Song of a Drop o’ Wather: A London Legend, A Companion to Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”, which LC owned (Lovett, no. 1837, p. 281).
11. Euclid: Greek mathematician active around 300 BC and still fundamental to the teaching of geometry at the time LC was writing. LC wrote a defence of Euclid in the form of a comic five-act drama, Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879).
74. curves of beauty: In Modern Painters II, Ruskin wrote that “all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively of curves” (The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12), iv, p. 88).
91. “passive beauty”: Cf. Wordsworth’s poem “Address to my Infant Daughter”, his month-old daughter Dora: “to enliven with the mind’s regard / Thy passive beauty”.
First published Train, iv, December 1857, pp. 332–5.
The Lang Coortin’
The poem mimics the locutions and the laconically doom-laden stories of the old Border Ballads, just then fashionable again, as in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Border (1832).
7. popinjay: An old word for a parrot; also a dandy.
First published College Rhymes, iv, 1863, pp. 32–9.
Melancholetta
The performance they take “his” sister to was Shakespeare, King John, followed by the burlesque opera by William Barnes Rhodes, Bombastes Furioso (1810). But even the burlesque cannot make her laugh: she still finds tears in things (hounds, whales, tiers) in a materialist version of “Lacrimae rerum”. LC copied into Mischmasch several extra verses, the last of which is:
The other night I tried a slice
Of melon, and I eat a
Large quantity, it proved so nice –
That night in dreams I met her,
Green as a melon, cold as ice,
“Dearest!” she moaned, “art better?
Thy melon I – will that suffice?
Or must I add -choletta?”
Signed B.B., a frequent pseudonym for his comic poems from the time of the family magazines on.
First published College Rhymes, iii, 1862, pp. 67–71.
The Three Voices
The three-lined, three-rhymed stanzas follow the metre of Tennyson’s “The Two Voices” (1842), originally titled “The Thoughts of a Suicide”, written when Tennyson was in despair
after the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. The parody picks up the grand generalisations that in the original have the weight of misery but here become pompous and absurd; for one example, see Introduction, p. xxxi, and for another:
Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn.
Vast images in glimmering dawn,
Half shown, are broken and withdrawn.
The metaphysical extremes of the lady’s speech also pick up on the “Spasmodic” poets of the period whom LC also mocked in “Poeta Fit Non Nascitur” (see p. 376 note to line 17). LC copied the poem into Mischmasch and then revised it for its first publication in Train, ii, November 1856, pp. 278–84, where it has a very different opening from this Phantasmagoria version:
He trilled a carol fresh and free,
He laughed aloud for very glee:
There came a breeze from off the sea:
A Double Acrostic
LC disliked dancing and is here mocking the follies of the Christ Church Commemoration Ball (25 June 1867), which excludes him and leaves him penning acrostic verses. He includes an in-joke: the poem harks back to the very first number of College Rhymes, i, 1861, p. 3, where the first poem opens with praise of Oxford:
There stands an ancient city by the side
Of a broad river, and her palace-towers
Rise royally, by wisdom sanctified,
From out her leafy bowers.
Here, instead of “by wisdom sanctified”, “No words of wisdom flow” (60).
The answer to this double acrostic might be (as suggested in The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll (1932)): Commemoration; Monstrosities. But a better solution is that of H. Cuthbert Scott: Quasi-Insanity; Commemoration: see Edward Wakeling and Kazunari Takaya who worked out the cross-lights: Quadratic, Undergo, Alarm, Stream, Ice, Interim, No, Supper, Arena, Night, I, Two, Yawn in Mischmasch: The Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society of Japan, ix, 2007, pp. 152–71. See also Fisher, p. 49, for various solutions. Most of LC’s double acrostics are found in “Poems for Friends” and “Late Collections”.
Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense Page 29