What's your experience with the Jabberwocky?

It makes more sense to me when spoken aloud. Somehow the gibberish seems to have meaning. I like it!

Oh, yes, mac. I'm sure it was intended to be read aloud. If you get the cadence just right, it seems like it should really make sense, if only you were paying attention. Remember Steve Martin's routine involving the pseudo Spanish phrase "Mucho Undo Gundo!? If you say it just right, most Hispanics will look like they almost, but not quite caught your meaning.

I love it! Definitely for reciting. I've had it memorized since HS or so, come out with it at odd times.

The fact that Jabberwock is gibberish but seems to make sense is the whole point of the poem. Carroll (Dodson) was both having fun and making a serious point at the same time. Language requires that the individual who is receiving a message reach closure. That is decide what the message means. The rules of syntax allows a person to decode messages no matter how complex and closure requires that we assign a meaning. Carroll was exploring the boundaries of this process. Just how far could he go with nonsense, and at the same time make it sound plausible. Linguist's love this kind of stuff because grammatically the poem is perfectly sound.

I think he was also making fun of a form -- a whole lot of the Alice books seems to be some variation of Carroll looking at Alice Liddell's school books or listening to her complain about school and reacting with "What pretentious rubbish!" So that's a certain kind of declamatory, heroic poem made ridiculous.

I love it just as I love Dr. Suess. The cadence and the blatant nonsense make it wonderful for reciting. My son recited it in 8th grade and it did seem perfectly reasonable except for the fact that it didn't make sense...

Carroll does have Humpty Dumpty explain it later, though I never liked the explanation -- the original, unexplained words are more evocative. Brillig is some sort of twilight, slithy is lithe + slimy, toves are I think something like a badger and something like a -- lizard? Etc. Some of it is actual insight (lithe + slimy, though that could be figured out), a lot is additional silliness (badgers?)

Meanwhile "gallumph" and "chortled" were created in that poem, and use them as real words.

Actually he is making fun of a popular mid 19th century academic fad in England called Anglo Saxon studies. One of the manifestations of the racist ideology that seized the English speaking world in the mid 19th century was the idea that white English speaking people were descendent from a "race" of barbarians that had imparted to them a "vigor" that made them more "fit" then others for world hegemony. As a result there was a increase early medieval studies of of "Anglo Saxon" poetry, history archaeology etc. The romantic movement in literature and art reflected this at mid century (Tennyson, Ruskin etc). The poem is made up of faux Anglo Saxon words. The theme appears again in Through the Looking Glass in several of the minor characters.

Cool, didn't know that!

I think I said this in another discussion, but I found an old school book of some kind, and recognized it in reverse, so to speak -- Carroll was satirizing it, but since we're no longer familiar with "it", "it" sounds like Carroll. ("You are old, father William" and such.)

In You are Old father Williams, Carroll is making fun of a sappy, moralistic poem by Robert Southey call "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them. A comparison of the two poems can be found here:

http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/?school/alice1018.html

Really, Soz? At one time I had memorized about 2/3 of The Walrus and the Carpenter. I no longer remember why, but odds and ends of it still pop up, from time to time.