JABBERWOCKY And other stuff

Back in the 1870's, Lewis Carroll wrote two of my favorite poems, which were part of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The first was
Jabberwocky, which begins:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

(That gave Spellcheck a workout!)


I recall one summer evening when I received a telephone call from a young man my girlfriend had been talking up to me for a while. During the conversation, out of the blue, he quoted the first two lines of that to me. I immediately came back with the next two lines. We knew right away that we had at least something in common, and we made a date. (We found out quickly enough afterwards that we didn't have much more, and never had a second date.)



The other one is Father William. It begins:

"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."


It's a rather lengthy, silly poem. It amuses me.



I always loved to hear my sister read Alice to me. But when I was small, the illustrations in the book frightened me. I wanted to hear it, not look at it.