[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Essays.Jabberwockian Studies

Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, is a wonderfully nonsensical poem that embodies most everything one could want in a story meant only to entertain. Set in the mystical land of no one really knows where at a time when, at least for half of the poem, the terrifying and dreadful Jabberwock wiffles and burbles through the tulgey wood. In these treacherous times though, a hero with his vorpal sword in hand sets out to defeat the beast, despite the better warnings of a man who considers our hero his son. After seeking out his foe for a long while, the hero encounters the Jabberwock, slays it, and returns home to his father in a blaze of glory. Man triumphs over beast, and a frabjous day is had by hero and father alike.
Carroll, in telling this simple narrative, explains everything is terms that make, quite literally, no sense at all (they’re not even real), yet still convey the message that he wishes to get across to his readers. It would seem that he is a master of language in that he is able to paint images and feelings using words that do not even exist. He’s spouting out words that you might expect a 5 year old to utter when they are unable to pronounce the actual word. “Brillig,” “mimsy,” “manxome,” each are words found nowhere else in the world, and yet we can tell exactly what is meant by just listening to ourselves as we say them. “Frumious,” for example, gives off a distinctly rotten taste when leaving the tongue, while “Callooh” or “Callay” might as well be made of the things that children dream of. No matter what ‘whiffling’ may be, if a creature such as the Jabberwock is doing it, it just can’t be a pleasant sight to see. ‘Frabjous days’ must be some of the best around, and we only know it because of Carroll’s careful construction of how each of these imagined words sounds and their placement in his poem. He doesn’t use real big words, because he doesn’t need them – the context and resonance of his words does it for him.
His poem being, from what I can tell, mostly just for entertainment value, Carroll makes Jabberwocky interesting, and even fun, to read. He gives us plenty of time to digest each and every thought in his poem through the use of plenty of commas, hyphens, and short sentences. There are no long, uninterrupted lines where the reader ever feels like they are being dragged through the poem. Instead, Carroll uses short, 6-8 syllable lines like “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” which allows readers the chance to take it what they’ve read, compose themselves, and then continue forward. His sense of rhyme and meter also add to the sense of a reader’s enjoyment when reading this poem. Whether it be at the end of nearly every line in the stanza with “son” and “shun”, or even amidst a single line itself with “dead” and head”, the rhyme gives the poem an ease of reading that helps it to be read smoothly and eloquently. He typically uses the ABAB rhyme scheme, one commonly found in children’s songs, with the exception of the 3rd and 5th stanzas. This is perhaps to simply emphasize that rhyming patterns needn’t be strictly followed, just so long as your poem still works towards its goal.
When examining this typical tale of triumph a bit closer, we may notice that he develops each of his characters rather differently. Only the father speaks directly, giving him a sense of importance. He is a man who is never described, and says very little, but still contributes the only direct sets of dialogue, setting him well apart from the nameless hero and the loathsome Jabberwock with “the jaws that bite/ the claws that catch.” The monstrous Jabberwock, meanwhile, is described loosely as a thing with fiery eyes that burbles as it comes. A fearsome beast, no doubt, but one who is still no match for our hero, who is never detailed in any way but his actions. Carroll builds each of them a different way, almost as if he is three different writers at once. His landscapes are, once again, described with nonsense words that we can only really imagine. Made up trees and things called borogoves, which were apparently very mimsy at the time, are all we see other than the characters inside a tulgey wood.
Put simply, Carroll makes an entirely nonsensical poem into something beautiful, simply by adding several elements to it like rhyme, a variety of character creation methods, and words that evoke emotion and comprehension through their sound, rather than through any real connection we might have to the word. The poem tells a story, does it well, and still makes no sense by the next day. What more could you honestly want from it?
FIN

© Tyr Hawkaluk (2004-Present)