to a fire-breathing dragon. (Since it "burbled as it came," we can well assumesome sort of conflagration in its innards.) If we accept this convention, then we are involved in a mystical and magical world somewhat removed from the fairy-tale world, but one equally as fascinating.

But I seem to have digressed somewhat from my main concern. What, one may ask, does "Jabberwocky" have to do with the introducing of poetry, with which, as my title suggests, this paper ought to be concerned?

If the poem does offer such a wealth of material to the linguist, the semanticist, and the folklorist, is there anything left for the teacher seeking an effective way to introduce a poetry course, or a section of poetry in a grabbag literature course? Here I violate mathematical principles to stress a point: the sum is more than the total of its parts.

Because the teacher of literature should always be a linguist and a semanticist and often even a folklorist, "Jabberwocky" offers a particularly unique and valuable experience to the student as he is being led into the treasure house of poetry, the Taj Mahal of literature.

First, although the teacher of poetry is not likely to be a trained linguist, he is, in a different way, nearly as much concerned with sounds as the linguist. And he must also be a semanticist, aware of the richness of connotation and able to point it out to his students. He differs in one important respect: he is a linguist and a semanticist simultaneously. He is concerned with the fusion of sound and sense and must not here make the mistake of compartmentalizing, and so destroying the fusion that is there. He must recognize that he is approaching an entity on the printed page as static in form as Michelangelo's Pietà. If a dynamic experience is to be the result, it will result from the subtle interaction of poet, poem, and audience; the task of the teacher is to make that experience as dynamically charged for his students as possible….

Writing now more pragmatically, I can demonstrate that "Jabberwocky" has specific values which qualify it as a touchstone in a poetry course.

For one, the poem can be shown to illustrate all three of the common modes of poetic discourse: lyric (descriptive), dramatic, and narrative. The first stanza (repeated as the last) is clearly lyric, describing a scene and establishing a mood or atmosphere for the subsequent story. The second and sixth stanzas are dramatic: the father figure (or King Arthur-figure) is addressing the young hero in both stanzas, first warningly and then, upon the hero's return, joyously. The middle three stanzas are narrative, recounting the successful venture of the hero, culminating with the decapitation of the Jabberwock and the bringing of the grisly trophy home, much in the same manner that Beowulf brings the head of Grendel from his dam's lair to Heorot. Thus the poem can be classified, if so desired, as primarily narrative, but with lyric and dramatic elements.

Also as a touchstone poem to introduce poetry, "Jabberwocky" offers several characteristics that place it in the mainstream of much of the great body of English and American verse. (1) It is written in four-line stanzas, certainly the most common stanza length. (2) The prevailing rhythm is iambic, by far the dominant rhythm of both English and American poetry. (3) Alternating rhyme is used in most of the stanzas, and all of the rhyme used is masculine. (4) Tetrameter, along with pentameter the most common length of the English-language poetic line, is used throughout. (5) One may also point out that the form of stanzas three, five, and six, except for the lack of alternating trimeter, is identical to that of the prevailing early ballad stanza, still a popular stanza form.

Among other poetic devices that may be pointed out to students are alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, figurative language, and onomatopoeia. Alliteration, for example, is evident in line two (gyre and gimble), line eleven (Tum-tum tree), and line twenty-two (beamish boy). Assonance is especially remarkable in the repeated stanza through the sounds /i/ (brillig, slithy, gimble, mimsy) and /o/ (toves, borogoves, mome) as, to even greater extent, is consonance, with /b/ (brilling, gimble, wabe, borogoves, outgrabe), /g/ (brillig, gyre, gimble, borogoves, outgrabe), and /m/ (gimble, mimsy, mome). Internal rhyme is used in lines eleven (he, tree), seventeen (two, through), nineteen (dead, head), and twenty-three (day, Callay). And though it is difficult to distinguish figurative language in "nonsense verse," "eyes of flame" in line fourteen is probably metaphoric. The poem is especially rich in onomatopoetic technique, with such words as "whiffling," "burbled," "snicker-snack," "galumphing," "Callooh! Callay!" and "chortled" as prime examples.

Perhaps by now I have clearly established what value "Jabberwocky" has as a poem especially fit to introduce the student to the great depth and breadth of the poetry which has been composed in the English language.