page_title: Jabberwocky
section_title: Linguistics and poetics
hierarchical_section_title: Jabberwocky / Linguistics and poetics
context_page_description: "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of Looking-Glass Land.
  In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realizing that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems and reads the reflected verse of "Jabberwocky". She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape.
  "Jabberwocky" is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. Its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neologisms such as "galumphing" and "chortle".
context_section_description: Though the poem contains many nonsensical words, English syntax and poetic forms are observed, such as the quatrain verses, the general ABAB rhyme scheme and the iambic meter. Linguist Peter Lucas believes the "nonsense" term is inaccurate. The poem relies on a distortion of sense rather than "non-sense", allowing the reader to infer meaning and therefore engage with narrative while lexical allusions swim under the surface of the poem.
  Marnie Parsons describes the work as a "semiotic catastrophe", arguing that the words create a discernible narrative within the structure of the poem, though the reader cannot know what they symbolise. She argues that Humpty tries, after the recitation, to "ground" the unruly multiplicities of meaning with definitions, but cannot succeed as both the book and the poem are playgrounds for the "carnivalised aspect of language". Parsons suggests that this is mirrored in the prosody of the poem: in the tussle between the tetrameter in the first three lines of each stanza and trimeter in the last lines, such that one undercuts the other and we are left off balance, like the poem's hero.
  Carroll wrote many poem parodies such as "Twinkle, twinkle little bat", "You Are Old, Father William" and "How Doth the Little Crocodile?" Some have become generally better known than the originals on which they are based, and this is certainly the case with "Jabberwocky". The poems' successes do not rely on any recognition or association of the poems that they parody. Lucas suggests that the original poems provide a strong container but Carroll's works are famous precisely because of their random, surreal quality. Carroll's grave playfulness has been compared with that of the poet Edward Lear; there are also parallels with the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the frequent use of soundplay, alliteration, created-language and portmanteau. Both writers were Carroll's contemporaries.
caption: Humpty Dumpty who explains to Alice the definitions of some of the words in "Jabberwocky". Illustration by John Tenniel, 1871
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