11–12. There is no value for x in the final equation. Gardner, Universe (p. 15) suggests that this may be a whimsical self-portrait by LC since he has no place in the dance.
Size and Tears
Written November 1862. LC was slim.
First published College Rhymes, iv, 1863, pp. 113–15, signed R. W. G.
Poeta Fit Non Nascitur
title Poeta … Nascitur: Poeta fit, non nascitur: a poet is made, not born (Latin).
17. spasmodic: A bombastic school of poetry, fashionable in the 1840s and 50s, and mocked by William Edmonstoune Aytoun in his parody, Firmilian: A Spasmodic Tragedy (1854): see “The Three Voices” and note. Aytoun was one of the two writers combined in the pen name Bon Gaultier whose ballads influenced LC (see Introduction and note 10).
84. ‘Exempli gratiâ’: For example (Latin).
91. Boucicault: Dion Boucicault, Irish actor and playwright famed for his melodramas, especially The Coleen Bawn (1859).
First published College Rhymes, iii, 1862, pp. 112–16, signed K.
Atalanta in Camden Town
Algernon Swinburne published his verse tragedy “Atalanta in Calydon” in 1865. LC admired Swinburne’s work and knew him personally. The first verse of the Chorus may have given LC hints for the metre but there is no absolute resemblance, rather the joke lies in the transposing of rapturous language to more mundane circumstances. “When the foam of the bride-cake is white, and the fierce orange-blossoms are yellow” (25) instead of:
When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
15. Dundreary: A foolish aristocratic character given to malapropisms and extreme sideburns in Tom Taylor’s play Our American Cousin (1858).
First published Punch, 27 July 1867, LC’s only publication there: see Introduction.
The Elections to The Hebdomadal Council
The Hebdomadal Council
This poem is satirically written in the person of a liberal (Goldwin Smith) objecting to the victory of the conservatives on the Oxford University Hebdomadal Council, by a majority of one, and purports to be a second edition of the letter LC objects to. From LC’s note 23 on, the voice is that of the anonymous poet responding to the unrealistic proposals of his opponent. The manner is much closer to Pope’s satires, including the use of heroic couplets, than elsewhere in LC’s work.
title Hebdomadal Council: The executive council of Oxford University from 1854 until 2003.
epigraph “Now is the Winter of our discontent”: Shakespeare, Richard the Third, i, 1, 1. On Dr Wynter, see LC’s note I (p. 166).
24. Jowett: Benjamin Jowett was in 1862 charged with heresy by Edward Pusey, though this was not pursued, and in 1865 Jowett was elected to the Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford. His suggestions for university reform promised to open admission to many less wealthy students, emphasising intellectual ability, not gentlemanly manners or forebears. Hence the allusion (165) to Fagin, the cunning master-thief in Dickens’s Oliver Twist who trains the boys as pickpockets: “brain, and brain alone, shall rule the world”. LC was among those who objected to Jowett’s salary being raised from a meagre sum and he was here on the side of those who opposed any change in the statutes towards meritocracy.
27. Who would … blow!: From Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 2, stanza 76: “Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not,/Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?”
45. caucus-meeting: A caucus is a closed meeting of like-minded electors: taken further, a conspiracy. LC was suspicious of this method of consultation: in the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland, all the creatures chase round and round without a clear outcome.
First published anonymously as a pamphlet in 1866. For other of LC’s satirical poems on Oxford controversies, see “Oxford Poems”.
Phantasmagoria: Part 2
The poems in Part 2 are all more earnest in tone and together show LC’s quite considerable capacity as a serious writer concerned with issues of life and death and with women’s dilemmas, particularly in “The Path of Roses” and “The Sailor’s Wife”.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Written April 1868. Reprinted in Three Sunsets.
Beatrice
Written 4 December 1862. The second Beatrice is Dante’s beloved (19–21, 34), the first is the young girl martyr of the first century AD whose body had been exhumed in 1822 and passed into the care of nuns in Rome (22–8). The poem is probably addressed to LC’s five-year-old child-friend Beatrice Ellison.
First published College Rhymes, iv, 1863, pp. 46–9, signed C.L.D.
[Acrostic Lines to Lorina, Alice and Edith]
The first letters of each line compose the given names of three of the Liddell sisters. The poem was inscribed in his present to them of Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839; 2nd edition, 1856) and was dated Christmas 1861. Sinclair’s children are unruly and naughty but not wicked, and are described with wit and affection: a book to LC’s taste. This is the only single-acrostic poem in Phantasmagoria; see “Poems for Friends” for many more examples.
The Path of Roses
This serious poem was written in tribute to Florence Nightingale, under the sorrow of the ravages wrought by the Crimean War, 1853–6. First published Train, i, May 1856, pp. 286–8.
79. Azrael: The Archangel of Death occurs in several religious traditions
The Sailor’s Wife
One of several of LC’s serious poems from the 1850s and early 60s that express themselves as dream or nightmare (cf. “In Three Days”, “Stolen Waters” and “The Path of Roses”). Here the watchdog’s bark welcomes home the lost sailor.
First published Train, iii, April 1857, pp. 231–3.
Stolen Waters
The poem recalls John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, though in this case a child redeems the speaker. It may also have been a response to Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862), which LC especially admired.
title Stolen Waters: “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Proverbs 9:17 (King James)).
First published College Rhymes, iii, 1862, pp. 106–11, signed C.L.D.
Stanzas for Music
The original title in Mischmasch was “The Willow Tree”. When reprinted in Three Sunsets, it is dated 1859. Set to music by William Boyd in 1870 as “The Bridal”.
Solitude
Despite the reference to “years hath piled” (37), LC was 21 years old when he wrote this poem. It may have been prompted by memories of his mother’s sudden death two years earlier at the age of 47, two days after he began his Oxford degree, and by the impossibility of returning to the intact childhood family. When reprinted in Three Sunsets, it is dated 16 March 1853.
First published Train, i, March 1856, pp. 154–5, under the name Lewis Carroll, the first time that the pseudonym appears.
Only a Woman’s Hair
Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726): the hair may have been that of Esther Johnson, the Stella to whom he was devoted, and Swift’s “Only a woman’s hair” was probably ironic or defensive. LC’s imagining of different women and their hair concludes with the scene at Bethany (24–34) when the woman who had sinned wiped Christ’s feet with her hair in her devotion (Luke 7:36-50). When reprinted in Three Sunsets, it has the date 17 February 1862.
First published College Rhymes, iii, 1862, pp. 59–60, signed C.L.D.
Three Sunsets
First published as “The Dream of Fame”, College Rhymes, iii, 1862, pp. 3–7, signed C.L.D. Reprinted as title poem in Three Sunsets.
Christmas Greetings
Written at Christm
as 1867. In Phantasmagoria this poem is printed in minute “diamond”-size type as befits a message from a fairy. It was reissued separately in 1884 in “pearl” (one size larger) and included in editions of Alice in Wonderland after that date and in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1886). It was later inscribed in the “Alice” window at All Saint’s Church, in Daresbury, LC’s birthplace (dedicated 1935).
After Three Days
Holman Hunt’s painting The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple presented a new naturalism in the treatment of religious subjects and hotly divided opinion in 1861 when it was first exhibited at a private viewing in London. LC wrote to his sister Mary that “it is about the most wonderful picture I ever saw” (Letters, i, 42–3). Cf. Luke 2:42–51. He was in sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their desire to bring experience close through accurate and homely detail. When reprinted in Three Sunsets, it is dated 16 February 1861. First published Temple Bar, ii, July 1861, pp. 566–8.
Faces in the Fire
Copied into Mischmasch and dated January 1860, just before LC’s 28th birthday on 27 January. In the early versions it has a less melancholy opening stanza:
I watch the drowsy night expire,
And Fancy paints at my desire
Her magic pictures in the fire.
An extra verse after stanza five imagines the lost beloved as a mother. First published Dickens’s All the Year Round, 11 February 1860. Reprinted in Three Sunsets.
Puzzles from Wonderland (1870)
First published Christmas 1870 number of Aunt Judy’s Magazine (Aunt Judy’s Christmas Volume, 1871), pp. 101–2.
VI
5. Full: Northern pronunciation as “fool”.
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872)
[Prologue to “Through the Looking-Glass”]
33. “happy summer days”: The last words of Alice in Wonderland.
36. pleasance: Alice Liddell’s second name, meaning delight.
Jabberwocky
The first verse of “Jabberwocky” appeared in Mischmasch in 1855, accompanied by various definitions of the words (see “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry”). In Chapter VI, Humpty Dumpty gives his own, sometimes different, definitions: brillig = “four o’clock in the afternoon – the time when you begin broiling things for dinner”; slithy = “lithe and slimy … a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word”; toves = “something like badgers – they’re something like lizards – and they’re something like corkscrews”; gyre = “to go round and round like a gyroscope”; gimble = “to make holes like a gimblet”; the wabe is “ ‘the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?’ said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity”; mimsy = “flimsy and miserable”; mome rath = “ ‘rath’ is a sort of green pig but ‘mome’ I’m not certain about. I think it’s short for ‘from home’ – meaning they’d lost their way, you know”; outgrabe = “ ‘outgribing’ is something between bellowing and whistling, with a sort of sneeze in the middle”. LC introduces a number of these words into The Hunting of the Snark: mimsy, borogoves, outgrabe, Jubjub, frumious, Bandersnatch. The syntax in “Jabberwocky” is stable although the semantics are odd; so the story is compelling though its elements are obscure.
The reversed stanza (and title) is found in Through the Looking-Glass (1872).
[“Tweedledum and Tweedledee”]
This is a nursery rhyme slightly varied by LC. Two other nursery rhymes in Looking-Glass also control the fates of their heroes (“Humpty Dumpty’s Song”, “The Lion and the Unicorn”). In Wonderland only the “Queen of Hearts” nursery rhyme functions in this way.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
For the 1887 production of Savile Clarke’s operetta based on the Alice books, LC wrote an extra verse at the end of the poem as well as songs for two ghostly oysters:
The Carpenter he ceased to sob;
The Walrus ceased to weep;
They’d finished all the oysters;
And they laid them down to sleep –
And of their craft and cruelty
The punishment to reap.
The first oyster sings:
The Carpenter is sleeping, the butter’s on his face,
The vinegar and pepper are all about the place!
Let oysters rock your cradle and lull you into rest;
And if that will not do it, we’ll sit upon your chest! [line repeated as chorus]
The second oyster sings:
O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham!
You’re greedier for Oysters than children are for jam.
You like to have an Oyster to give the meal a zest –
Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest! [line repeated as chorus]
See Introduction.
[Humpty Dumpty’s Song]
Humpty Dumpty flouts the usual rules of sentence structure by repeatedly ending with a conjunction: see Introduction. Fishes and shell-fish haunt the Alice poems as well as LC’s earlier verse.
[The White Knight’s Song]
For an earlier and shorter version of this poem, see “Upon the Lonely Moor”. Its subject matter parodies Wordsworth’s poem “Resolution and Independence”: see Introduction. The metre of LC’s poem derives from Thomas Moore’s “My heart and lute”, which begins: “I give thee all – I can give no more”, and Alice recognises it. That allusion would have signalled a more poignant undersong to the first readers.
30. Rowland’s Macassar-Oil: A gentleman’s hair product, hence the “anti-macassar” covers placed over chair backs in the period and later.
59. Menai bridge: Between Anglesey and the mainland, it was a prodigious feat of early-nineteenth-century engineering, which opened in 1826; it needed frequent repair. During its construction the iron was soaked in warm linseed oil (rather than wine).
[The Red Queen’s Lullaby]
1. Hush-a-by lady: “Hushaby baby, on the tree top”: for once a less alarming version than the original, “Down will come baby and cradle and all”.
[“To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said”]
A parody of Walter Scott’s “Bonny Dundee”, whose first verse and chorus run:
To the Lords of Convention ’twas Claver’se who spoke,
’Ere the King’s crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke;
So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me,
Come follow the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle your horses, and call up your men:
Come open the West Port, and let me gang free,
And it’s room for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee.
[The White Queen’s Riddle]
The answer is “an oyster”, which sits in its own dish and seals its cover up tight.
Wasp in a Wig
This song appears in the “Wasp in a Wig” episode that LC dropped from the final version because Tenniel objected to it both as a weak link and because he could not think how to illustrate it.
First published ‘Wasp in a Wig’: a ‘suppressed’ episode of ‘Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice found there’, with a preface, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (London: Macmillan, 1977).
[“A boat beneath a sunny sky”]
This poem is placed at the end of Looking-Glass: the first letters of each line spell Alice Pleasance Liddell. “Life what is it but a dream” recalls the last line of the well-known round, perhaps another of the songs the young Liddell sisters sang:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Oxford Poems, with some Memoria Technica
Examination Statute
LC wrote this just before a vote on a proposal to adopt a new statute which, he felt, would damage mathematics and classics by lowering the requirements. The statute was passed on 25 February 1865. A facsimile of the 1864 Ox
ford print, showing all the names, is in the Parrish Catalogue, p. 102, in Princeton University; see also Handbook, p. 24. First published as a pamphlet, Oxford, 1866.
The Deserted Parks
The poem was part of a campaign to keep the university parks from being used as college cricket grounds and so excluding the citizens of Oxford from their enjoyment. The poem, very aptly, takes Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770) as its model, a poem that mourns the enclosing of common ground for a rich man’s garden. The campaign was successful.
epigraph “Solitudinem … appellant”: The emended Latin motto is from Tacitus, Agricola, 30: Atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant: And where they make a desolation they call it peace (Parcum = park, LC’s jokey correlation of pacem = peace).
First published anonymously in 100 copies, 1867.
The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford
The anonymously published pamphlet (1872), which included the satirical poems included here as well as a “Hamlet” skit, was prompted by Dean Liddell’s rebuilding programme at Christ Church for which the well-known architect George Gilbert Scott was employed. It had been discovered that the tower at the cathedral was unstable and there was a risk that the bells might fall, so they were removed and a new belfry built for them. LC was under the impression that the wooden structure (“tea-chest”) employed during the building of the belfry was to be the finished product. What he called “the blot” (26) still exists unseen within the finished Wolsey Tower completed 1878.
Song and Chorus
See note to “The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford” and Introduction. For commentary, see Pamphlets, i, pp. 67–79.
From The Vision of the Three T’s: A Threnody by the Author of “The New Belfry” (1873)
The “Three T’s” are “Tunnel, Trench, and Tea-Chest”. (Cf. “A Bacchanalian Ode”, line 28). On “Tea-Chest”, see note to “The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford”. Published anonymously by James Parker and Co., Oxford, 1873.
The Wandering Burgess
Another satirical go at the Belfry, cast in LC’s favourite mode of a Border Ballad. Willie is William Gladstone, sometime British prime minister, a frequent butt in LC’s satirical verses, and here mocked for his trailing around the country seeking a parliamentary seat; but even Gladstone is shocked by the “Tea-chest” in the Quad.
Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense Page 30