"Jabberwocky"

Lewis Carroll

What a fine thing language is — boundlessly inventive, fanciful, jesting, sometimes as sharp as a spear or a shaft of light, sometimes meditative, like an afternoon in Indian-summer with the tang of ripening apples in the air, and sometimes vague, dim, suggestive, like a whisper in the night. People say it’s the most powerful tool man has made. Not so fast, not so fast! It’s more than a tool. It is a power of the human soul, encountering the mystery of itself, and other souls, the wide world around us, and the far wider world within us. Can you weave a spell? Sure you can. A little child asks for a story, and you glance up and to your right — which is where stories are located — and you say, “Once upon a time,” and a world comes into being. Only you don’t tell the child that. You say that once upon a time a girl named Alice went down a rabbit-hole, or somehow ended up on the opposite side of a looking-glass, and there you have it, or it has you.

You may say, “Well, but we do depend on words already invented,” so we’re bound by language. As much as to say that you’re chained by your legs, because you have to use them to walk into the fields! But the thing is, we invent words all the time, and people can get them without a dictionary, so long as they can recognize the forms. Language then is our sport, a kind of universal musical instrument with strings, pipes, stops, whistles, reeds, steel bars, jugs, rattles, skins, crystal glasses, bells, bags, bellows, and horns, and many a slight and slender thing that sounds and has no name.

Read the Poem of the Week below. It’s what got Alice through the looking-glass, and it’s all nonsense — except, you know, we do make sense of it. I don’t know that I want to be around “slithy toves,” which to my ear (though not to Humpty’s, who explains it to Alice) sound like water-lilies that are slippery, like the inside of okra. But I sure would like a “vorpal blade,” because if it’s as vorpal as the poem says, it can cut through anything, “snicker-snack!” What a “frabjous day” that would be. Other blades may be mimsy. Or worse — they frittle when you strike something really stranch, like a graniment or an iron galt. If it’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a frittly blade when I’ve got an iron galt to deal with. It’s enough to make a guy go jub-jub.

I can’t wait for the comments on this one!

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

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.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
      He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

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