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.
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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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