[In the following excerpt, Clark discusses Carroll's verse parodies in Through the Looking Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.]

In writing to his child-friends Lewis Carroll was not averse to verse, however he might tease. Nor was he averse in his fiction—for it comprises one of the most memorable features of his Alice books. It contributes to the humor and nonsense and absurdity of the books, through its play with "real"-world forms and its parody, and through its concreteness and its interaction with the surrounding prose.

Carroll played with "real"-world forms sometimes by making things more orderly and sometimes by making them less. But of course order and disorder are all a matter of perspective. When Humpty Dumpty defines glory as "a nice knock-down argument" he disorders our real-world semantic order, from one perspective, but the simple act of defining the word, of associating it with a meaning and not leaving it in the limbo of meaningless noises, is itself an act of order. Humpty Dumpty's new order may be unfamiliar, but it is not entirely chaotic. Or take "Jabberwocky." Does it disorder our orderly universe? Yes, in part, for "brillig" and "slithy" have no familiar meaning. Yet, as students of language are fond of pointing out, the grammatical structure of the poem is orderly, making it possible for us to decipher, for instance, the parts of speech to which the nonsense words belong. And the words themselves combine consonants and vowels the way English words do (unlike, say, the Wonderland Gryphon's "Hjckrrh!"). Further, Humpty Dumpty's explication provides an ordering of the meaning as well. When he expounds, "'Brillig' means four o'clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin broiling things for dinner," he describes a world with a modicum of order, one that can be envisioned as in, say, Tenniel's drawing.

Another way of describing Carroll's play with "real"-world forms is in terms of open and closed fields. Susan Stewart, in her recent study Nonsense, catalogues nonsense transformations and finds some within the closed fields described by Elizabeth Sewell in her early Field of Nonsense, closing what is traditionally open, while others do the inverse, opening what is closed. Yet whatever we call the two transformations—whether we use this broad definition or else associate nonsense only with the first kind of transformation and associate the second with the absurd—Carroll uses both kinds. He sometimes opens what is traditionally closed (making a mirror into a door) and sometimes closes what is traditionally open and on-going (making time stand still at six o'clock). And often what Carroll does is a complex amalgam of both opening and closing. In his parodies, for instance, some of the wordplay focuses attention on the words, fencing them off from reality, making them a closed world: rhyme and alliteration draw attention to the words and distract us from whatever it is the words are meant to refer to. The parodies also close themselves off as separate worlds to the extent that they do not refer to recognizable reality: how does one balance anything as slippery and floppy as an eel on the end of one's nose? On the other hand, the references to artifacts outside the poems—to other poems—opens the form, and the parodies would also seem to shatter the closed universes of the pietistic poems they mock. The parodies operate in both closed and open fields—they both order and disorder—and part of their effect derives from the confrontation between the two. We can call them nonsense, or something else, but the parodies draw upon both kinds of transformation.

It has become convenient to refer offhand to most of the verse in the Alice books as parodies. But again we run into a problem of definition. This time I want to define the term more narrowly, for the very general way in which we use "parody" sometimes blinds us to important distinctions. Sometimes we call something a parody if it reminds us of a previous work, whether or not any satire is intended. But I'd like to reserve parody for something that satirizes. Dwight Macdonald, for instance, situates Carroll's works closer to what he calls burlesque than to parody: "he simply injected an absurd content into the original form with no intention of literary criticism." Macdonald is right for some of Carroll's verse, but I would disagree with his contention that Carroll never intended literary criticism, for sometimes Carroll does intend literary, if not moral, criticism [MacDonald, 1960].

Sometimes, if not always. For only in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the verse truly parodic. How doth the little crocodile, for instance, undermines the pious preaching of Isaac Watts's "How doth the little busy bee," which admonishes children to keep busy and avoid mischief: the crocodile presented for our emulation, far from skillfully building a cell or neatly spreading wax, "cheerfully" and "neatly" and "gently"—snares fishes. Much of the other pious verse that Carroll parodies in Wonderland is similarly subverted. While Carroll does not entirely disagree with the sentiments of the poems he parodies—especially in later life, when he wanted to outbowdlerize Bowdler—and thus does not mock that which is preached, he does mock the preaching. Carroll may not be criticizing the content (he surely is not inciting children to be slothful), but he does criticize the literary purpose of didactic verse, the way in which it tried to control children. In part Carroll may simply be entering into the child's perspective, adopting the child's responses to pietistic verse, for he shows considerable sympathy for the child's point of view. And perhaps Carroll's satire of the didacticism of previous children's literature clears a niche for the new kind of children's literature he wanted to write. Much as Alice tries to define herself by attempting to recite familiar verse, Carroll seems, intentionally or not, to be defining his fiction through Alice's failure to define herself, through her mangling of her recitations.

In Through the Looking-Glass however, it is as if Carroll's success with his first children's book freed him from the need to comment on what previous writers had done for, or to, children. The verse is less parodic. Although some of it plays with pre-existing poems, it is harder to label such playing parody, harder to convict it of literary criticism. Carroll's "parodies" in the two books might be placed on a continuum, from the true parodies like that of Watts to reflections of the original that are not necessarily satires (what Macdonald describes), to mere echoes that may not actually be related to a so-called original. The drinking song begot of Scott, sung at the Looking-glass banquet, mimics some lines of the original but probably without any intent to satirize. And still farther from parody is "The Walrus and the Carpenter," which shares its meter and rhyme scheme with Thomas Hood's "The Dream of Eugene Aram" and also the discovery of an unexpected murderer, but which is not otherwise tied to the so-called original. Carroll himself wrote in a letter to his uncle, "I had no particular poem in mind. The metre is a common one, and I don't think 'Eugene Aram' suggested it more than the many other poems I have read in the same metre" (Letters).

Looking-Glass verse tends toward this latter end of the continuum. Carroll here does not demolish children's verse. For the most part, he either uses fantastical nursery rhymes, which do not need to be demolished, or else he plays with adult poetry, which can perhaps be poked and prodded at but need not be so utterly crushed as the sugar-coated moralizing intended for children.

I will demonstrate how Carroll uses pre-existing verse in Looking-Glass by examining the changes he rings on Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence." The White Knight's poem includes echoes of other poems—Wordsworth's "The Thorn" and Thomas Moore's "My Heart and Lute"—but I'll concentrate on "Resolution and Independence." Carroll had written an early version of his poem by 1856, and this version describes a situation fairly close to that in Wordsworth's poem: in both the narrator encounters an extremely old man upon the moor, asks his occupation, and is comforted by the exchange—although Wordsworth's narrator is comforted by the man's cheer and steadfastness, while Carroll's is comforted by the man's "kind intent / To drink my health in beer." The closest verbal echoes are in the closing lines. Wordsworth ends with "I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!" ["The Prelude" edited by Carlos Baker (1954)], and Carroll ends with "I think of that strange wanderer / Upon the lonely moor."

This echoing of concluding lines is emblematic of the relationship between the two poems. While the Watts parody starts off proclaiming the poem it twists, repeating the opening "How doth the little," as well as "Improve" and "shining" in the second Une, the Wordsworth derivative waits till the conclusion for a close verbal echo. Furthermore, Carroll entirely omits all reference to the meditative early verses of Wordsworth's poem, and even changes the meter and rhyme scheme. "Upon the Lonely Moor" is simply not very close to "Resolution and Independence." And it is not that Wordsworth's lines utterly forbid parody. Surely, if he had wanted to, Carroll could have embellished "Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead, / Nor all asleep" by adding something like (but better than) "Nor scrubbing scones nor eating flies / Nor starting in to weep." He apparently wanted to use Wordsworth's dramatic situation as a scaffolding more than he wanted to use Wordsworth's poem as a source for parody.

The later version of Carroll's poem, the one that appears in Looking-Glass, is even farther from Wordsworth. The echo in the last two lines has entirely disappeared, and so has all reference to moors. Instead of situating his aged man on a romantic and evocative moor Carroll sits him on a gate. Compared to the earlier version, the nonsense is better, the parody less.

Nevertheless, Carroll himself did call the poem a parody, in a letter to his uncle—but he went on to modify his use of the term: "'Sitting on a Gate' is a parody, though not as to style or metre—but its plot is borrowed from Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence' …" (Letters). Carroll uses the term "parody" for lack of a better word, to describe his borrowing of the plot, or dramatic situation, his use of the poem as a scaffolding. He goes on to indicate what in Wordsworth's poem he might well like to satirize, for it is "a poem that has always amused me a good deal (though it is by no means a comic poem) by the absurd way in which the poet goes on questioning the poor old leech-gatherer, making him tell his history over and over again, and never attending to what he says. Wordsworth ends with a moral—an example I have not followed." Carroll uses Wordsworth's dramatic situation here, but doing so, though it may poke fun at the narrator's greater interest in his own thoughts than in human interaction, does not undermine Wordsworth's sentiments, his praise of resolution, nor his communing with nature, nor his introspection. And the final version of the poem has strayed far enough from the original that Carroll needs to stress to his uncle that it is a parody.

We may be too eager to find satiric comment on Wordsworth in Carroll's poem, since the convenient label for the poem is parody and that is what parody is supposed to do. But while Carroll might not mind tweaking Wordsworth's nose when he starts platitudinizing, Carroll less clearly satirizes Wordsworth than he does Watts in the crocodile poem. And in other derived poems in Looking-Glass, such as that sired by Scott, the original neither pedantic nor moralistic, it is even harder to find what Carroll could be satirizing. The complexity of the relationship between Carroll's and Wordsworth's poems, or Carroll's and Scott's, a relationship not easily defined by our usual interpretation of "parody," complements the complexity of Carroll's nonsense and absurdity, which both reveres and defies, both orders and disorders, both closes and opens.

Another way in which Carroll's verse is humorous and nonsensical, in addition to parodying and playing with forms from the "real" world, is through what Elizabeth Sewell calls "a careful addiction to the concrete," [The Field of Nonsense (London, 1952)]. Instead of evoking a twinkling star and comparing it to a diamond, Carroll makes a bat twinkle like a tea-tray. Or he unites shoes, ships and sealing wax, or cabbages and kings. Yet not all of Carroll's verse is humorous in precisely this way. Some of it is less concrete and complete in itself, and part of its humor lies in how it integrates with the surrounding narrative. And since little or no attention has been paid to this other source of humor, I am going to concentrate on it at the expense of "careful concreteness." Again, as with the parodie playing with form, the humor derives from a varying tension, or confrontation, between opening and closing the verse: the concreteness and completeness tend to close it, while the integration with the narrative opens it. In Wonderland the King of Hearts attempts to integrate verse into the story when he uses the lines beginning "They told me you had been to her" as evidence of the Knave's guilt. Yet the ambiguous pronoun references in the lines invite all interpretations—and substantiate none. And the King's attempt to use this verse as evidence ironically substantiates its inadmissibility and hence underscores the disjunction between verse and story. Much of the humor of the verse derives from the use the King makes of it.

Looking-Glass verse tends to be even more integrated with the narrative. Both form and content are integrated, the latter in four ways. I will first discuss the integration of the content, and then turn to the form.

Overall, the content integrates with the prose thematically. Alice finally says, with only slight exaggeration, that the poetry was "all about fishes." (And in the context of playing with kittens, and frequently thinking about eating, it is not amiss to dream about fishes.) In addition, some of the verse relates directly to the action: the Red Queen sings a lullaby when the White Queen wants to nap; and the creatures sing toasts at the closing banquet. Some of the verse is interpreted by the characters, who thereby attempt, as it were, to accommodate the verse to the narrative: Humpty Dumpty interprets "Jabberwocky"; and even the Tweedles offer some interpretations of "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Finally, some of the verse is enacted in the story: notably, the nursery rhymes come to life.

In providing sources for Looking-glass characters, the nursery rhymes strengthen the integration of verse and story. Much as Wonderland creatures sprout from metaphoric proverbs (except for the Queen of Hearts and company, derived in part from a nursery rhyme but also from playing cards), such Looking-glass creatures as Humpty Dumpty and the Tweedles derive from nursery rhymes. As Roger Henkle notes, the careers of the nursery-rhyme creatures "are predetermined by the nursery rhymes about them" ["The Mad Hatter's World," in Virginia Quarterly Review, 49, 1973]—they derive, in other words, from entire verse-stories, not from mere phrases. Or, even if the creatures are ignorant of their predetermining verses, Alice and the reader are not, and we see how the verse does indeed determine actions, how highly integrated verse and narrative are. In Wonderland, on the other hand, while the King acts as if the previous behavior of the Knave of Hearts has been described by a nursery rhyme, Alice and the reader are not convinced. The nursery rhyme does not have determining force there—it is merely posited—while nursery rhymes do affect Looking-glass world, the verse does affect the narrative: Humpty Dumpty does come crashing down.

The appearance of nursery-rhyme characters in Looking-Glass also makes the book self-conscious because Alice knows about the characters in the story of her adventures through knowing other stories—she is "in the ambiguous position of being a reader in a story where she meets fictitious characters and so knows all about them" [Barbara Hardy, "Fantasy and Dream" in Tellers and Listeners, London, 1975]. This self-consciousness is somewhat different from self-consciousness in Wonderland. There Alice may comment that the Mouse has reached the fifth bend of his concrete poem, self-consciously commenting on the poem; but it is only the poem that she views as a literary artifact, not the creatures she encounters. Her comments underline the differences between the poemand the narrative rather than merge them. In Looking-Glass, though, she is self-conscious about both poems and narrative, and she even wonders if she herself is part of the Red King's dream. Although Alice may simply be playing another version of "Let's pretend" at the end, when she asks Kitty which dreamed it, her question does hint at a serious issue. And the poem that concludes Looking-Glass, ending as it does with "Life, what is it but a dream?", continues the impetus of self-consciousness. Such self-consciousness can at first remind the reader of the boundaries between fiction and reality, since the fiction proclaims its fictionality. Hence it would close the work off from reality. Yet, as Borges queries of the work within a work: "Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious" ["Partial Enchantments of the Quixote" in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, Austin, 1964]. The self-consciousness in Looking-Glass likewise hints that what appears tangible may be only a dream, that presumed realities are really fantasies, that reality is subjective. Looking-Glass may not be a fully self-conscious novel, one that, in Robert Alter's words, "systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and … by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality" [Alter, 1975], but it does tend somewhat in that direction, to confound reality and fiction. Once again, though indirectly, the Looking-Glass verse occasions integration, integration here of the larger realms of fiction and reality. And once again, Looking-Glass balances closure and self-containment with openness and permeation.

Enough of metaphysics and back to the verse again: not only is the content integrated with the narrative but so is the form. Not only is there thematic continuity between verse and prose, via fishes, and not only is one sometimes an adumbration of the other—as with the Tweedles, Humpty Dumpty, and the Lion and the Unicorn—but the physical integration of the two has also increased in Looking-Glass. Of course, this verse, like the verse in Wonderland, is set off from the rest of the text by being in verse form. Yet in Looking-Glass the segregation of verse and prose falters. Perhaps even the railway passengers' refrain, "——is worth a thousand——a——," is a verse more completely integrated with narrative, a verse not typographically segregated: Alice considers the refrain "like the chorus of a song."

Once more I would like to amplify the argument by examining specific examples. First I will look at the White Knight's verse and then Humpty Dumpty's, both of which merge with the surrounding narrative.

After droning on "mumblingly and low" with his "so" / "know" / "slow" rhymes, the White Knight abruptly ends his poem with "A-sitting on a gate. " The last line provides the rhyme for "weight" so long held in abeyance, until the record needle finally came unstuck, and hence provides some closure. Yet the poem shows a tendency to continue into, merge with, the ensuing narrative. For the interminable o-rhymes, essentially paratactic, could go on forever, comic invention willing. And they make the abrupt concluding line seem tacked on, anticlimactic. This anticlimax is humorous, as Carroll wants it to be, but it also, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith might note, leaves the reader "with residual expectations." [Smith, 1968] These residual expectations make the reader receptive to the possibility of an additional line or lines. And, in fact, the next words the White Knight speaks are "You've only a few yards to go"—consistent with the poem's meter and rhyme. The poem pushes beyond its physical boundaries.

Humpty Dumpty's verse likewise shows a tendency to continue into the narrative, a merging anticipated by Alice's frequent interruptions during the recitation. Some of the stanzas are as follows:

The little fishes' answer was
'We cannot do it, Sir, because——'

…. .

And he was very proud and stiff:
He said 'I'd go and wake them, if——'

…. .

And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, but——

Alice's comment shortly after hearing the poem, as she leaves Humpty Dumpty, is "of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met——." Because of forces working against closure in the poem, her comment would seem to be a reprise of the unfinished sentences in the above stanzas.

Now it is not that there are no forces working to close the poem. The line that Alice speaks and that could continue the poem is not spoken immediately after Humpty Dumpty's recitation, nor is it spoken by the character reciting the poem, nor is it a complete couplet, nor is it metrically consistent with the poem. Then, too, we may resolve some of the poem's lack of closure by declaring it humorous, labeling its dissonance and making it acceptable, so that we need not continue to seek closure. Yet the forces working against closure are stronger.

In the first place, the verse purports to tell a narrative, but its story is truncated. The narrator tells of the need to wake the little fishes and of going to the locked door and trying to get through. We expect some kind of resolution: perhaps the narrator breaks through the door, perhaps the door proves sentient and assaults the narrator, perhaps the narrator wastes away to a hummingbird egg as the continually pounds and kicks and knocks. Yet the action is not resolved but interrupted. Similarly, we expect resolution of other hints in the plot: what nefarious deed, requiring the presence of the fishes, does the narrator intend to perpetrate with his kettle of water?

Instead of resolving the plot the poem simply stops, defying closure. And Alice, puzzled, acts out the reader's discomfort over the poem's abrupt completion. Alice is particularly puzzled by the concluding stanza, the one in which the narrator tries to turn the handle of the door: she pauses, she asks if the poem is over, she finds Humpty Dumpty's dismissal—of the poem and of her—rather sudden. Humpty Dumpty's abrupt good-bye at the end of the poem reinforces the abrupt stopping of the poem itself.

Not only is the narrative action truncated but so too is the sentence begun in the final stanza, as in the other stanzas quoted above. In both the overall plot and also the sentence, the meaning is lefthanging: both are semantically incomplete. And the sentence is syntactically incomplete as well.

I can elucidate the syntactic and semantic open-endedness of this verse by comparing it to a rather different openendedness in verse from Wonderland. The verse about the Owl and the Panther concludes thus (in some versions of the poem):

When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by——

The final line is incomplete, but—guided by meter and rhyme, by our knowledge of panthers, by our knowledge that "by" wants here to be followed by a verb ending in "ing"—we can readily complete the line with "eating the Owl." Even the narrative plot of the verse reaches resolution with this ending, thus reinforcing the implicit closure. With our complicity the verse silently reaches syntactic, semantic, and narrative closure. The Looking-Glass verse, Humpty Dumpty's open-ended verse, is rather different. The lines are metrically complete, with appropriate end-rhymes, but semantically incomplete. And the narrative plot is incomplete too. Rather like the later riddle poem, "'First, the fish must be caught,'" whose riddle is never solved for us, and perhaps a bit like the riddle posed in his own nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty's poem reaches no resolution. Although the stanza reaches prosodic closure, thanks to the tidy end rhyme, the meaning stretches beyond the verse form, eluding closure, eluding the tidy solipsizing of the verse.

Much of the humor of Humpty Dumpty's verse derives from its integration with the narrative, its interruptions, its incompleteness. Some critics find this the least satisfactory of Carroll's verse, and while it is certainly not the best it does become better if we look at it not in isolation but in context. At times the proper unit of analysis is not the poem by itself but the entire dialogue, of which the poem is just part.

Like Humpty Dumpty's poem, if not always to the same degree, the Looking-Glass poems are surprisingly integrated into the story, thematically and even physically. Of course, they remain typographically distinct from the prose as well—and again there is a tension between opening and closing. Another site for this tension is the overall structure of Looking-Glass. In fact, the greater merging of poetry and prose, compared to Wonderland, may in part compensate for a more rigid, closed structure in Looking-Glass. Where Wonderland describes a relatively aimless wandering, Looking-Glass describes a prescribed progression toward a goal, as Alice moves across the chessboard. The individual chapters reinforce the structure by corresponding to individual squares. Carroll counteracts the rigidity of this structure in several ways. One is his placement of lines of asterisks: in Wonderland these asterisks, signalling Alice's changes in size, can appear at the end of a chapter, coinciding with and reinforcing a narrative boundary; in Looking-Glass, though, Carroll seems careful not to place asterisks, here signalling movement to the next square, at the end of a chapter. Thus Carroll dissipates, a little, the clear demarcations of his narrative. Similarly, in Looking-Glass Carroll sometimes does not complete a sentence begun in one chapter until the following chapter: again, Carroll is ameliorating the strict division into chapters. It is as if he wanted to attenuate the rigid boundaries imposed by the chessboard structure. The greater integration of the verse may be similarly compensatory. It attenuates the rigidities of the external scaffolding of the book, much as narrative plays against and dissipates the external scaffolding of the Ulysses story in Ulysses.

In fact, Carroll's integration of verse and narrative in Looking-Glass is one of the many ways in which he anticipates twentieth-century literature. In some ways Wonderland seems rather modern—as in its associative, non-sequential plotting—and in some ways Looking-Glass anticipates current fiction. One such way is the way Carroll incorporates verse. His Looking-Glass parodies are not true parodies but rather they play against the scaffolding of pre-existing poems, like some of Yeats's poetry, which uses materials in his A Vision, yet the images in, say, the Byzantium poems do not need to be followed back to their source before we can appreciate them. Carroll's parodies too can stand alone, divorced from their sources. Though not from the narrative. For the relationship between verse and narrative also seems modern. Recent writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover have incorporated verse in their novels yet subverted strict boundaries. In Nabokov's Pale Fire, for instance, the novel's plot grows out of footnotes presumably annotating a poem: the poem is far from a mere set piece that a character happens to recite. These novelists carry further certain hints in Carroll's work, going farther than he in merging verse and narrative, fiction and reality.

The interaction of poem and narrative in Looking-Glass may thus be approaching twentieth-century forms of interpenetration. And Carroll's humor derives in part from this integration and in part from the opposing tendency toward concrete completeness. Likewise it derives in part from parody and in part from simply playing with "real"-world forms. The humor and nonsense and absurdity depend on a confrontation between opposites, a confrontation that we cannot quite resolve in "real"-world terms. Defining "glory" as "a nice knock-down argument" disagrees with our usual use of the term. It is hard even to make it agree metaphorically, as we can when glory is described as clouds that we trail as we come from God. Instead, the odd juxtaposition, the unresolved confrontation, makes us laugh, strikes us as absurd. And we resolve the disparity, a little, by calling it nonsense, something that need not overturn our comfortable real world. Yet despite its resolution it still hints at revolution, still hints at a more serious questioning of reality.