Perhaps the most recognized cultural export from Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the poem “Jabberwocky” first appears in a book Alice discovers during her initial encounter with the Red Queen and King in the looking-glass room. At first glance, “Jabberwocky” is complete nonsense, with about a quarter of its verbiage entirely products of Carroll’s mind (known as nonce words); Alice herself can hardly make sense of the poem, only able to deduce that “somebody killed something” (Carroll). However, she additionally notes that the poem “[fills her] head with ideas,” though she cannot fully articulate them (Carroll). It seems that “Jabberwocky” may be more familiar than it appears.
In short, “Jabberwocky” details the defeat of the monstrous Jabberwock at the hands of an unnamed protagonist and his heroic reception with the prize of the monster’s head. Carroll structures the tale of the Jabberwock as a ballad, consisting of seven quatrains. In a traditional ballad, the first and third lines of each quatrain would be written in iambic tetrameter, and the second and fourth lines would be written in iambic trimeter. With the exception of one line, Carroll follows iambic rhythms, but he alters the traditional ballad meter by placing only the fourth line in trimeter:
’Twas bri-llig, and the sli-thy toves
Did gyre and gim-ble in the wabe:
All mim-sy were the bor-o-goves,
And the mome raths out-grabe.
Even without knowledge of technical terminology for meters, a Victorian reader who might be familiar with more traditional ballads would subconsciously (if not consciously) pick up on this auditory resemblance. This similarity in form, coupled with the poem’s narrative structure—the hero’s journey, made more clear by Humpty Dumpty’s later clarification of some “nonsense terms”—establishes that Carroll is directly referencing and twisting the traditional form of the ballad poem.
Each stanza of “Jabberwocky” serves a distinct narrative purpose, allowing it to be easily unpacked and analyzed. Humpty Dumpty explains several of these nonce words to Alice within the first quatrain, allowing it to be somewhat translated: it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the lithe toves were ambling about the grass near a sundial. The birds were miserable, and the lost pigs were bellowing. Carroll establishes the known, which allows the protagonist to journey away from it once they hear their call to action. This call materializes in the second quatrain, in which the protagonist’s father warns him of the dangers that lurk. He seems hesitant to face this threat in the third, ultimately loitering until the Jabberwock appears in the fourth. He slays the beast in the fifth, and returns home with his spoils in the sixth. The seventh quatrian fully repeats the first, confirming to the reader that normalcy has been restored.
Carroll closely follows the structure of the hero’s journey, a narrative that Alice would certainly be familiar with even as a child. Ultimately, though “Jabberwocky” speaks of creatures and locations unfamiliar, Carroll bridges the gap between Wonderland and our world with just enough difference to warp the familiar past recognition.