She eventually meets Twaddle Dee and Twaddle Dumb who tell her the poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter. ” She later meets Humpty Dumpy who tells her that he can make words mean whatever he wants and then proceeds to explain to her the meaning of the poem “Jawbreakers. ” Alice is then taken prisoner by a Red Knight and later rescued by a White Knight, both of whom keep falling off their horses, and guided safely to the eighth square where she is made a queen and invited to the Red and White Queen’s nonsensical inner party, after which she once again wakes up and realizes that the whole thing was just a dream.
The poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter’ from Through the Looking Glass is a classic tale narrated by Twaddle Dee and Twaddle Dumb about a walrus and a carpenter who, while strolling down the beach one sunny night, convince a large bunch of oysters to take a walk with them: ‘Their shoes were clean and neat-I And this was odd, because, you know/ They hadn’t any feet” (74-75). After much talk of whimsical nonsense, the walrus and the carpenter eat the unsuspecting oysters.
There are many speculations on what the symbolism behind this poem actually is, but one theory, addressed in the movie Dogma, suggests that it is about religions tricking their followers. According to this theory, the walrus represents Eastern religions as either Buddha or Changes, while the carpenter represents Jesus and all Western religions. The two Of them trick the helpless oysters, representing the innocent masses, with their words and then use them for their own gain, which in this case is as food.
Many argue that this is to the true meaning behind the poem since Carroll was also an Anglican clergyman, but it is also noted that he was pushed towards his clergy position by his father and eventually grew to dislike the whole of the Anglican Church. The true meaning of the poem may never be known since Carroll never told anyone, and it was one of many things left unexplained in his diaries. “Jawbreaker)/’ is yet another famous poem from Through the Looking Glass, containing many of the characteristics that earned Carol’s works the title “literary nonsense.
This poem is first read by Alice when she holds the book containing it up to her mirror, and the first stanza is later told by her to Humpty Dumpy when he claims to be able to explain any poem ever invented and a good many that haven’t been invented yet. “Jawbreakers” is about a boy who is warned by his father to beware the Jawbreaker, a great beast with jaws that bite and claws that catch, and so takes his approval sword and seeks the beast. When they meet, the boy slays the monster and takes its head back to his father to receive his praise.
Humpty Dumpy explains to Alice that many of the words in the poem are portmanteaus, or words with two meanings packed into them. For instance, “slightly” means both “lithe” and “slimy,” while “missy’ is “flimsy” and “miserable” at the same time. He also clears up the rest of the nonsense words in this poem such as “outgrowing,” which he says is something between bellowing and whistling with a sneeze in the middle. The first stanza goes: “Twats brills, and the slightly doves/ Did gyred and gamble in the wave / All missy were the boreholes / And the mom rats outgrew” (126).
As Humpty explains it to Alice, this loosely translates to, It was four in the afternoon and the slightly doves, a mix between a badger, a lizard, and a corkscrew, went round and round the grass-plot of a sundial until they had worn holes in the ground. The boreholes, thin, shabby birds with their feathers sticking out, were missy and the mom rats, sorts of green pigs that lost their way, outweighed. This style of making up words to describe altogether new concepts or creatures as he pictured them has been compared to that of Dry.
Issues: it provides entertainment to children who ugh at these nonsense words, while at the same time has its own meaning when explained. Lewis Carroll had a writing style unlike any seen before his time. His “literary nonsense” has provided entertainment for countless children, while amusing and stimulating the minds of adults at the same time. While many of the characters and events in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are known or debated symbols or references to something else, their true meanings could only ever be understood by Carroll himself. Works Cited Carroll, Lewis.
