A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky by Lewis Carroll

A Poem from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Sep 17, 2009

A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky is a stirring poem, especially when read unencumbered by serendipitous subtext (though Lewis Carroll makes such inclinations unavoidable).

Lewis Carroll's A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky is derived from his sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

This sequel of sorts, a bit of literary nonsense called Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, is an amalgam of different literary elements, consisting mainly of Carroll’s symbol-laden imagery.

The most dazzling of Carroll’s literary wizardry is found in the tone he sets for Through the Looking-Glass, through changes in the weather, and seasons of the year.

A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky begins with Lewis Carroll's surreal remembrance of himself, holding court before three children, floating lazily upon a river, in the evening hours of summer.

Soon, clouds roll in, and the sky and the tone turns dark (ever so slightly), curiously raising the specter of innocence lost:

It is within this stanza that Carroll chooses to completely shift the focus from the children and their shared experience to himself, as both the navigator of the boat, and of the text.

A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky becomes no longer an ode to child-like wonder, but an elegy to the author's adolescent muse:

The last few stanzas do return perspective, re-focusing on a child's effortless ability to escape reality; floating along in a sort of Wonderland of experience, real and imagined, unaware of the passage of time:

It may benefit the first-time reader to be unaware of the fact that A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky is an acrostic poem (a poem in which the first letter, word, or syllable spells out an independent word or message).

To be unaware of this fact, frees the reader to thoroughly ingest A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky, before feeling obligated to spell out the name Carroll carefully placed hidden in plain sight:

For to spell out this name is to send the reader down a rabbit hole, in search of answers; to seek out the roots of Lewis Carroll's seemingly delirious obsession with his adolescent muse named Alice Liddell.

Alice Liddell in real life was a young girl that so captured Lewis Carroll's imagination as to call into question the writer's unorthodox, some say inappropriate relationship; spawning a mystery that has for years lead inquisitive minds to read between the lines; to search for dark subtext in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The copyright of the article A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky by Lewis Carroll in Poetry is owned by Martin G. Wood. Permission to republish A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky by Lewis Carroll in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.