Poem of the Day: ‘A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky’

At first glance, the poem could appear too straightforwardly elegiac to be the work of Lewis Carroll, the familiar master of nonsense.

Via Wikimedia Commons

Today’s Poem of the Day provides an odd closure to a well-known but strange novel, the 1871 “Through the Looking Glass,” by Lewis Carroll (1832–1898). We’re accustomed to Carroll (whose real identity was an Oxford mathematician, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) as a writer who regarded language as a place to play. Two of his parodies have run previously as the Sun’s Poem of the Day: “How Doth the Little Crocodile,” which mocks the moralizing verse of Isaac Watts, and “Atalanta in Camden-Town,” which rather convolutedly makes fun of Algernon Charles Swinburne. 

“Through the Looking Glass,” the sequel to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” features again a young heroine named for the daughter of a friend, in another series of adventures in a strange country. Though as madcap and jokey as the first novel — it includes, for example, the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” among other now-famous verses — “Through the Looking Glass” taps into a subterranean stream of sadness.

In one chapter, for instance, Alice is walking with a fawn through a “wood where things have no names.” Beneath the amnesiac trees, she and the fawn converse as intimate friends, Alice’s arm around the fawn’s neck — until they emerge and remember, and the fawn flees in terror from the human child. It’s a heartbreaking moment, a striking scene amid all the puzzles and puns and general surreality of the Looking-Glass land. The loss of innocence, the return of recognition and fear in one blow, prefigures the poem with which the book ends.

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