Lewis Carroll – Jabberwocky
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 hast 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.
From the novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), a.k.a. Lewis Carroll.
In The Annotated Alice, critic Martin Gardner writes: “Few would dispute the fact that Jabberwocky is the greatest of all nonsense poems in English. It was so well known to English schoolboys in the late nineteenth century that five of its nonsense words appear casually in the conversation of students in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. Alice herself, in the paragraph following the poem, puts her finger on the secret of the poem’s charm: ‘…it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are.’ Although the strange words have no precise meaning, they chime with subtle overtones…”
“Jabberwocky” remains world famous, having been translated (in Gardner’s estimate) into at least fifty languages. It is one of the few short poems ever to have inspired a major motion picture (Jabberwocky, 1977, by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam):
