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Whoa, the English Poem Beats Me. Can you understand it at first sight?

 
 
Reply Sun 2 Oct, 2016 04:09 am

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

`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, has 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.

Source

If you failed to get, let's begin to crack it one by one.

Well first, what does "tulgey" mean there?
 
View best answer, chosen by oristarA
contrex
  Selected Answer
 
  5  
Reply Sun 2 Oct, 2016 05:30 am
"Jabberwocky" is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. It was included in Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There".

Many of the words in the poem are playful nonsense words of Carroll's own invention, without intended explicit meaning. When Alice has finished reading the poem she gives her impressions:

"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."

It is a great surprise to me that you do not know this, and could not find it out by a siomple search. Is your Internet so censored that you have no search facilities at all?
oristarA
 
  1  
Reply Sun 2 Oct, 2016 08:12 am
@contrex,
contrex wrote:


It is a great surprise to me that you do not know this, and could not find it out by a siomple search. Is your Internet so censored that you have no search facilities at all?



When I read a part of the poem in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (Chinese version), I was very surprised to find it so hard to crack. Then I searched it online and found the whole poem. As usual, checked those strange words in Cambridge Dictionary Online. Failing there, I posted the question, completely unaware of that it boggled Alice and other native speakers as well
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sun 2 Oct, 2016 06:32 pm
@oristarA,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
0 Replies
 
dlowan
 
  1  
Reply Sun 2 Oct, 2016 09:14 pm
@oristarA,
Martin Gardner's "The Annotated Alice" has cool explanations for most of it, many as said by Carroll himself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annotated_Alice

0 Replies
 
 

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