Today’s Poem: A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

Lewis Carroll’s acrostic epilogue

John Tenniel, illustration from Through the Looking-Glass, 1871 (Wikimedia Commons)

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A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

by Lewis Carroll

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?
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Today’s Poem, the latest in our Wednesday light-verse series, provides an odd closure to a well-known but strange novel, the 1871 Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll (1832–1898). We’re accustomed to Carroll (in real life the Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) as a writer who regarded language as a place to play. Poems Ancient and Modern readers will recall, for example, his “You Are Old, Father William,” in which he parodies tendentious moralizing verses by Robert Southey. “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” shows Carroll in a more elegiac, minor-key, though still inventive turn of mind. 

Through the Looking Glass, sequel to the 1865  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, features again the plucky, good-hearted young heroine, named for the daughter of a friend, in another series of adventures in a strange country. Though as madcap and jokey as the first novel — it includes the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” among other now-famous verses — Through the Looking Glass taps into a new, subterranean stream of sadness.

In one chapter, for instance, Alice is walking with a fawn through a “wood where things have no names.” Beneath the amnesiac trees, she and the fawn converse as intimate friends, Alice’s arm around the fawn’s neck — until they emerge and remember, and the fawn flees in terror from the human child. It’s a heartbreaking moment, a striking scene amid all the puzzles and puns and general surreality of the Looking-Glass land. The loss of innocence, the return of recognition and fear in one blow, prefigures the poem with which the book ends.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, c. 1895 (Wikimedia Commons)

“A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” might seem out of character for Carroll, too straightforwardly nostalgic to be the work of our familiar master of nonsense. Its rhymed tetrameter tercets recall the scene of his first telling the story that became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the real-life Alice Liddell and her sisters.

And of course the river is simultaneously both a real river — remembered from a real, enchanted day — and time, which bears all things away, until life itself seems nothing but a fantasy recalled. Yet even in this poem where his jokester’s mask seems to drop, Carroll continues his puzzle-play. The whole poem, in its poignancy, is an acrostic, spelling out, with each line’s first letter, Alice’s full name: ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL. 

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