Can someone tell me what the poem "the Jabberwocky" means?

Question

I have a test on it tomorrow...its by Lewis Carroll

Answer 1

My, my. The above was so comprehensive, I stopped reading it. It is about a boy who goes on an adventure to find the Jabberwok, it finds him while he is resting, he kills and beheads the beast and returns to his father as a hero.

My favorite verse is:

And as he stood in offish thought
The Jabberwock with eyes of flame
Came whiffling through the tulgey woods
And burbled as he came

Answer 2

I found this poem engaging and enjoyable. Your first stanza: Decisions made without a thought Are not the things that can be taught Split second ones can fill the page That cross my mind then disengage You set your goal in meter, rhyme and tonality. This excellent stanza is the foundation and precursor for the remainder of your poem and you don't disappoint. Your message is captivating, carrying through with the template you set with S-1. Your final couplet is a good summation and "sheathe" a courageous choice that works. Excellent poem, Bri.

Answer 3

What Is The Jabberwocky

Answer 4

Lewis Carroll, famous for including nonsensical poems in his beloved Alice stories, used “Jabberwocky” in Alice’s second Adventure: Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The poem is recognized as one of his most famous, and included made up words that have slipped their way into English dictionaries. The New American Handy College Dictionary has even come to use the word “Jabberwocky” to describe “gibberish” and “nonsensical speech” (369). Lewis Carroll, although using plenty of “jabberwocky” in his poem, never the less tells a gripping story with his use of diction, imagery, and themes that tie to the larger works the poem appears in.

Carroll begins and ends “Jabberwocky” with the same stanza that is filled with his nonsense words including “brillig,” “slithy,” and “wabe”. In fact, he wrote the first stanza years before the rest of the poem appeared in Through the Looking Glass (Carroll, Alice 255). Knowing that the readers of the novel would not understand this fantastical stanza, Carroll included an explication of his own through the words of Humpty-Dumpty later in Through the Looking Glass. Humpty-Dumpty explains what the author meant with his use of words like “slithy.” Carroll believed in enhancing meaning by combining words to take on the meaning that each word would have separately.

Even though the first stanza is indecipherable to one who has not read Humpty-Dumpty’s clarification of it, it sets up the whimsical nature of the poem for the reader. In addition, the stanza, despite being written years before ties the rest of the poem together and creates the feeling of one congruous whole. Carroll continues to use “home-made” words throughout the poem, mixing them with common words that tell the story of the “Jabberwock” beast.

The poem tells the story of a fairy-tale, filled with beasts and bravery. The scariest beast of all in the world of the poem is the Jabberwock, although the land is filled with others like the “bandersnatch” and the “jubjub” bird. Carroll uses or creates words like these that are obviously very carefully picked so that he may convey his story in a vivid and entrancing way. In an “entraviving” manner, perhaps, he would say. The word use in Jabberwocky fits in with the world that Alice has wandered in to as it is filled with things she does not immediately understand, things she is not used to finding in her own reality.

Imagery is an important element to Carroll’s Jabberwock. He makes it apparent from the start that the action is occurring in a land other than our own, even a land other than Wonderland. It immediately sucks the reader into a land where imagination is king, as there is no reason to the way things are. The poem appears in a book that Alice picks up, making it a fairy-tale even inside the odd land of the looking glass. “Jabberwocky” is typed backwards in the book, increasing the effect of wonderment on Alice, who can understand none of it. Its appearance in the book heightens the strangeness of the poem itself, amazing Alice even after her own adventures. Alice and the reader are left to see the poem as a tale of something strange and bewildering.

“Jabberwocky” follows the boy on his quest to rid his land of the evil Jabberwock. The reader immediately understands the task is not an easy one and that the beast is a terrible menace on the village the boy and his father reside in. Alice herself exclaims that, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-only I don’t exactly know what they are” (Carroll, Alice 132). The reader, like Alice, knows that the action has consisted of the heroic actions of a boy slaying a monster, even though Carroll doesn’t use conventional words to tell the story. The imagery is so sharp, that although the reader may not understand all the words, he or she has no problem following the action of the work.

By the end of the poem the reader understands that the boy has been successful in his quest to slay the Jabberwock. He returns home to his father bearing the head of the beast. Carroll displays this graphically in lines 19 and 20; “He left it dead, and with its head/he went galumphing back” (Carroll, “Jabberwocky” 1699). “Galumphing” brings the image of the excited ride of victory the boy partakes in to get home and announce his success. The dictionary theorizes that Carroll created the word from combining “gallop” and “triumph,” (289).

The joyous outburst of the father conveys what a wonderful thing that the boy has done for the village. The reader is left with the understanding that the world for the humans has been changed by the single brave act of the boy. Due to the slaying of the Jabberwock the world has changed for the better within the village. One could attribute this to Alice, if one considers her as the village that her adventures have changed, making her a better person.

As mentioned above, the poem ends with the same verse that it began with. The reader still has no solid understanding of it, but does understand that there has been some action in the land where the Jabberwock once roamed. The repetition of the opening stanza at the end tells the reader that although a major change has happened to the boy and the others he lives with, the action has had no major effect on the world in general. After the boy has slain the monster; the toves, borogroves, and raths still go on as they had before. Once again this can be looked at in reference to Alice’s own life, while she is altered, the outside world who do not realize what she has been through remains unchanged.

The themes of the poem are similar to some other narrative poems written around the same time. The poem deals with mythical and mystical creatures. Like Tennyson and Keats, Carroll tells an epic fairy tale, only he does it in seven verses as opposed to several pages. The poem deals with courage, which closes relates to Alice. She must use courage during her own adventures and while she is not slaying the monster, she is faced with many challenges.

“Jabberwocky” shows that everyone can do amazing things. The original illustrator of the Alice books, John Tenniel includes a drawing of his idea of the Jabberwock beast showing the boy as being in a “David and Goliath” situation. He is capable of overcoming the odds and making his village safer to live in. Alice, in a similar way must overcome her fears and doubts by using her wits to get out of the scrapes she finds herself in. This is a potent theme that gives the reader knowledge that they can do things that may seem impossible.

“Jabberwocky” is a poem capable of being an asset to the Alice books, all the while able to stand-alone. Lewis Carroll writes the poem as an enrapturing narrative poem that combines clever word use, vivid imagery, and strong thematic views to create a highly enjoyable read. Carroll effectively uses these things to make an epic fairy tale story in only thirty lines. It creates an alternate reality in an alternate reality filled with heroes and villains, with good overcoming evil."

AND

"Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' has been called "a parody of the whole ballad way of writing".(5) According to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, parody requires "a subtle balance between close resemblance to the 'original' and a deliberate distortion of its principal characteristics".(6) Lewis Carroll achieves this through a combination of ballad convention with invented nonsense elements, and by distorting the traditional folklore and legendary stories common to the ballad genre.

'Jabberwocky' consists of seven quatrains, using both ballad rhyme schemes, 'abab' and 'abcb'. Instead of alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, four of the stanzas use the 'abab' rhyme scheme, while three use 'abcb'. The poem also uses the same pattern of stresses as 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', with the first three lines of each stanza in tetrameter, and the last line in trimeter.

The language is a mixture of the simple, colloquial style of the traditional ballads, and Lewis Carroll's nonsense words, while the protagonist of 'Jabberwocky' is a very Victorian hero, as real ballad heroes act, rather than think:

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought-
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
The invented words give an archaic feel to the poem, and as Carroll was expressly writing to delight his audience of children, the unfamiliar words increase the excitement of the story. When Alice first sees the poem it seems to be "all in some language I don't know".(7) This is partly because it is a looking-glass poem, and has to be held up to a mirror to be read. It is usual for the first stanza of 'Jabberwocky' to be printed in reverse. This, plus the ingenious nature of "Humpty Dumpty's Explication" of the difficult words, shows Carroll's inventiveness and creativity in combining the familiar and the strange.

"Well, 'toves' are something like badgers - they're something like corkscrews."
"They must be very curious creatures."(8)
It is the nature of the traditional, supernatural ballad, and of parody, to combine everyday familiar elements with the unknown. Carroll also mixes the archaic language of the ballad convention with invented words that sound as if they could conceivably be archaic:

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms my beamish boy!
Although less numerous than in traditional ballads, there is still repetition of words to give a cumulative effect: "One, two! One, two! And through and through," and incremental repetition of lines:

And stood awhile in thought
And as in uffish thought he stood
Carroll also follows the ballad convention of repeated stanzas that form a refrain. The first stanza provides the abrupt beginning of the ballad style, immediately transporting us into the fantasy world of the Jabberwock. The stanza is repeated at the end of the poem, forming a frame. The rhymes are simple, and rhyming within lines is used mainly in the third line of each 'abcb' stanza:

Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
There is also extensive use of alliteration, and softened consonants.

In accordance with ballad convention, the narrator is impersonal, objective and removed from the action, and the story is told through narration, and dialogue, with addresses from a father to his son:

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!
There is very little characterisation, with almost no description of the hero, or the monster, except for a few ballad cliches: "The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame". The subject matter of the poem is a distortion of legendary, folk-lore quests, in which the hero must slay the dragon with an enchanted weapon:

He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back
This is not traditionally considered heroic behaviour, and the dragon is not the monster of traditional expectations, as it:

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
These three very different poems illustrate the flexibility of the ballad genre. 'The Wife of Usher's Well' is a founding poem of the genre. It exists in many versions, due to the imprecise nature of oral repetition, and is a perfect start for a consideration of the genre as a whole. It follows the basic ballad conventions, including the ballad stanza, the unaffected and archaic language, the use of repetition and rhyme, and the single, dramatic storyline. Keats adopted the ballad form for 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' as it gave him the freedom of a style distanced from the majority of Romantic poetry. The uncluttered nature of the ballad form allowed the beauty of his words and imagery to shine through, and the form was traditionally used for supernatural subject matter. For Lewis Carroll, the ballad form offered a style remote from everyday life, traditionally used to tell a story for entertainment. Its simplicity and archaic language were the ideal vehicle for his nonsense words, and it has been translated and proved popular in many languages, all over the world. The ballad genre, with its origins in oral tradition, and its magical connections to myth and folklore, is, therefore, adaptable to a variety of stories and purposes."

P.S. Portmanteau words: This usage of the word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, "Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau— there are two meanings packed up into one word." Carroll often used such words to a humorous effect in his work.