Danae Brown
English 3050
Sept 20, 2012
Jabberwocky
From Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
The Jabberwock
as illustrated by John Tenniel
for Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass
'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!
Danae Brown
English 3050
Sept 20, 2012
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.
Danae Brown
English 3050
Sept 20, 2012
Analysis of “The Jabberwocky”
Analyzing the poem by Lewis Caroll, “The Jabberwocky” gives the reader a magnificent
opportunity to look at nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech without the meaning of each
word distracting from the analysis. Additionally, Jabberwocky is considered one of the world’s
greatest nonsense poems (Gardner), which makes an analysis both educational and engaging.
The poem, “The Jabberwocky” comes from the book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice
Found There. In the book, Alice finds a book that seems to be written in an unintelligible
language, until she discovers that the poem is written in mirror image. Holding it up to a mirror,
she reads the poem, but she is still confused. Alice says,
It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's RATHER hard to
understand!' (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make
it out at all.) 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know
what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that's clear, at any rate-(Caroll)
Most readers would agree that the poem is rather hard to understand, but it tickles the senses
of those with an appreciation for creativity, oddities, and witticisms. In the poem, Caroll uses
the quintessential recipe of an adventure story: boy faces monster, boy slays monster, and boy
becomes a hero. Because of this, we gather the overall meaning of the poem. However,
because Caroll seems to take everyday words and twist them like a pretzel, or bring new words
to life, (much as Dr. Victor Frankenstein did with his own creation of mismatched parts), the
story defies complete comprehension.
Some of the more fascinating words in the poem are the verbs and adjectives, although the
nouns also tickle the old grey cells. This analysis will focus on stanzas one and two, and then
focus on stanza four. Here are our first two stanzas:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Danae Brown
English 3050
Sept 20, 2012
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
‘Twas brillig??? Brillig is definitely an adjective describing the condition of the day, but what
does it mean? Although Caroll defined of some of the words (either through Humpty-Dumpty’s
conversation with Alice later in the this book, or in some of Caroll’s later writings), do we really
need to know what Caroll was thinking when he wrote the book? Or, can we have more
enjoyment in making up our own understanding?
What about the words “The slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”? Apparently, there
are toves, which are slithy, so we must assume that toves is a noun, and slithy would be a
description of the noun, thus another adjective. Gyre and gimble are describing what the toves
are doing, so these are a pair of verbs. Finally, we need to decide where the toves did gyre and
gimble. Apparently, they did so in the wabe. In this instance, wabe appears to be a place,
therefore a noun.
At this same time, the borogroves (noun) were all mimsy (adjective). To make the day even
more brillig, “the mome raths outgrabe.” From the sentace structure, we either have a twoword noun known as a mome raths, or we have raths, which are mome. In the latter case, the
adjective mome describes our rath, while they are busy outgrabe-ing (verb).
Of course, we would be remiss if we did not focus some attention to our most famous noun in
the poem, the Jabberwock! We know it is to be feared. It has jaws (noun) that bite (verb), and
claws (noun) that catch (verb). The Jabberwock is described further in stanza four:
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
Our Jabberwock has eyes of flame (the reader can hardly be surprised at the Jabberwock having
eyes of flame; logically flaming eyes would accompany dangerous jaws and claws), but it can
also whiffle (verb) as it comes through the tulgey (adjective) wood (noun). But, if that were not
enough, the Jabberwock can also burble (verb)!
At this point in the poem, the heroic boy kills the Jabberwock and returns home to a father who
describes the day as “frabjous ” (adjective) with shouts of “Callooh! Callay!" as he chortles
Danae Brown
English 3050
Sept 20, 2012
(verb) in his joy. The father, the boy, and the reader can finally be at peace. After this
dangerous adventure in the nonsensical world of Alice and the Jabberwock, we can walk away
from the poem knowing that, according to Caroll in his final stanza, the day has returned to its
status quo:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Danae Brown
English 3050
Sept 20, 2012
Works Cited
Caroll, Lewis. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Through the Looking-Glass, by Charles Dodgson,
AKA Lewes Caroll. 1871. Web. 21 September 2012.
<http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12/pg12.txt>.
Gardner, Martin. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1999. Print.