Hailed as the most important nonsense poem in the English language, the poem, "Jabberwocky," serves to exemplify how language works and how it revitalizes itself.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice finds a poem in book and tries to read it, but the poem is written backwards, so she holds it up to a mirror to read it. She still does not understand it, even though she claims it did seem give her ideas.
That poem is now famously known as “Jabberwocky.” It is often hailed the most important nonsense poem in the English language. But if a reader looks closely, there is a method to the speaker’s madness in this poem. As Humpty Dumpty explains the poem to Alice, he demonstrates that the poet actually created an important, intelligent poem that is not entirely nonsense.
The Poem
“Jabberwocky” consists of seven quatrains. Each quatrain has the same rime scheme: ABAB. The poem actually tells of an event: a father warns his son about the dangers of the Jabberwock: “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch,” and then the son goes out and slays the Jabberwock. Not only does the son simply slay the Jabberwock, he cuts off its head and triumphantly returns home: “He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.”
The father welcomes his son’s victory and is quite proud of the youngster: "’And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? / Come to my arm, my beamish boy! / O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ / He chortled in his joy. “
“'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”
The first quatrain simply describes the scene including the time of day. According to Humpty Dumpty, “brillig” means about 4 o’clock in the afternoon when people are broiling things for dinner. And the “slithy toves” are lithe/slimy badger-like creatures. Humpty explains to Alice that the word “slithy” is a portmanteau or a word that is made by blending two words together. “Slithy” therefore is the result of blending “lithe” and “slimy.”
Of course, the term “toves” is more complex than just a badger-like animal; it is also like a lizard, and also like a corkscrew, and its diet consists primarily of cheese. Humpty further explains that “gyre” and “gimble” mean go round like a gyroscope and makes holes like a gimlet respectively. And ”wabe” is the grassy area around a sundial, that goes way out one way and way out another.
“Mimsy” is another one of those portmanteaus meaning flimsy and miserable, while ”borogroves” is a bird that looks like a living mop. Humpty was not sure what “mome” meant, but he thought it was a contraction for “far from home.” “Raths” were green pigs, and “outgrabe” is the past tense of the verb “to outgribe” meaning to sneeze in the middle of bellowing and whistling.
So a sensible translation of the first quatrain of “Jabberwocky” would be: It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the lithe and slimy badger-lizard-corkscrew-like creatures / Did go round like a gyroscope and make holes like gimlet in the grassy area around the sundial: / All flimsy and miserable were the living-mop-like birds, / And the far from home green pigs sneezed between whistling and bellowing.”
The Way Language Works
Besides the fun that this poem provides, it demonstrates something very important about how language works. Even though the poet employed “nonsense” terminology for the content words, he framed them in standard English function words. “twas,” “and the,” “and,” “in the,” and he even used a number of content words that make the story of the slaying intelligible.
“Beware the Jabberwock , my son!” From that command alone, the reader understands that the Jabberwock is a dangerous thing, but the next line underscores that understanding quite in sensible English, “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!” And then “He took his vorpal sword in hand” shows that the lack of an adjective does no damage to understanding the importance of the action.
The poet, Lewis Carroll, did not merely spew forth and bunch of “nonsense” words for this poem; he tells a story of a son slaying a monster. And through Humpty Dumpty in the novel explaining some of the other nonsense words, he demonstrates an important function of language in combining words to make new ones. Modern English does this abundantly with such terms as motel, brunch, spork, and cyborg.
