Jabberwocky By Lewis Carroll

A Study of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” When you read a poem, each individual person will interpret it many different ways. Some poems are very serious and intellectual, while some are humorous and seem to make no sense at all. What would you call the poem “Jabberwocky”? Just the name can conjure up many mindless thoughts. Lewis Carroll, the author of “Jabberwocky” was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in 1835. Carroll grew up in Cheshire, England, taught at home and later attending Oxford where he became a lecturer in mathematics. Carroll taught at Oxford throughout his entire career and has written many other poems and scholarly work on mathematics and logic; knowing this it appears the title of his poem “Jabberwocky” gives the impression that
This poem is “a mock-heroic ballad in which the identical first and last four lines enclose five stanzas charting the progress of the hero: warning, setting off, meditation, and preparation, conquest and triumphant return” (Drohan 90). The first line of the poem, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves” seems to make no sense. In the story Through the Looking Glass, Carroll uses Humpty Dumpty to explain what the words mean. Carroll is using two or more words and combining either their meaning or sounds of the words and making one word out of them. For example, “brillig” comes from the broiling or grilling done in the early evening (br + ill + i[n]g in preparation for dinner (Drohan 92). Carroll uses the language of the Anglo-Saxon poetry for the first and last stanzas as well as “manxome” or of a Celtic language-speaking race for the third stanza. Both languages are replaced in later years with the English language (Drohan
Indeed, these qualities seem to mutually reinforce each other, so that the less a reader understands exactly what the poem is about, in a traditional sense, the more he or she enjoys it. The more a reader enjoys it, the more he or she driven to understand it (Whitcovers 103).
Caroline M. Levchuck, who is a writer and editor, explains and translates the poem “Jabberwocky.” She starts out by telling us Carroll talks about it being evening time and creatures that inhabit the land. She relates about a father warning his son about an imaginary monster who is called Jabberwock. The father tells him of other creatures associated with the Jabberwock, and the son believing his father, goes on a mission to find the monster. The boy locates the Jabberwock, kills it, and beheads the creature. He runs back home elated telling his father what he did. The father is delighted for his son (Levchuck 107-08). When most people hear the name of this poem, they see it as funny, or nonsense; on the other hand, it has inspired many people throughout history. Some of the more famous people are Picasso Braque, Vladimir Nabokov, and Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Only Shakespeare and the Bible have been the only works that are quoted more than Lewis Carroll (Whitcover