This part of the poem reminded me of the assumptions that were circulating about Lewis Carroll's obsession with Alice when I was in graduate school. This was after the world learned that Carroll's extensive collection of photographs Carroll had taken included thirty nude photos of little girls, including Alice. One pose was of her clothed, but in an off the shoulder dress in a sensually suggestive pose. Some pooh pooh the implication of those photos, saying that it was a common practice in Victorian times to photograph children nude to celebrate their innocence (which I doubt) but knowing about the existence of the photos has given me the creeps about him.
Yes, he is mostly making the puzzle, and the poem serves that largely at the sacrifice of its own seriousness as a poem. But I think you're right that those lines get at the heart of an impulse that puzzle-making doesn't serve.
A confession: I've never read the Alice books. As a child I found the Disney version disturbing and never wanted to pursue the acquaintance. Maybe it's time, in my old age, to rectify that. I've certainly been delighted by bits and pieces seen here and there. And frequently had recourse to Humpty Dumpty's "The question is which is to be master--that's all."
The summer I was nine, I had a neurotic fear of falling asleep and kept myself up every night until daylight reading a number of books on repeat. Through the Looking-Glass, bizarrely, was one of them (another was a big anthology of animal stories that included a bit about a praying mantis by Gerald Durrell, whose name meant nothing to me at the time --- it was not the scene from Birds, Beasts, and Relatives where the praying mantis and the lizard fight to the death, fortunately). I don't know why I found Through the Looking-Glass comforting. Maybe it was just that I'd read it before that summer, and familiarity was comforting. At any rate, all my thoughts about it are bound up with the weirdness of those nights when sitting up with very strange imaginative company was preferable to falling asleep.
But I did also read them with my children, who were entertained by their cleverness.
I don't know --- I barely remember sleeping at all (fortunately at nine you're pretty resilient . . .). I do remember how awful the anxiety was, though, and how reading was a lifeline through it, even when the reading was really weird and --- you would think --- not at all comforting in terms of its subject matter. I read Dracula in the wee hours at my cousins' house at roughly the same stage, if that tells you anything.
Impressive that you were capable of reading Dracula at that age. I don't think I could have. I read it sometime in my teens and found it really scary, even though I was reading it in broad daylight on a summer day. Reading it again in middle age I was a bit disappointed that it didn't seem as scary...I guess I was jaded. But I thought it was better than I expected in literary quality.
In my mid twenties, when I was coming out of a period of serious anxiety, I read a couple of H.P. Lovecraft books while alone at night in the office of an otherwise deserted lumber yard where I was working as night watchman. I cannot fathom now why I did it or why/how it did not reduce me to paralyzed terror. But it didn't, and I enjoyed the books. I think I may have been sort of testing myself, to see if I could master the anxiety, if it returned.
I don't think I read it well, in terms of understanding what was going on, which was probably a mercy. No idea why I picked it up, of all the books on the shelf in their house.
It is probably stochastic, but I note that, in addition to the acrostic running down the opening lines of the whole poem, the <em>second</em> words in the first four lines spell out BOAT acrostically. Maybe that's deliberate? (Less likely is that the second words in the last three lines of the poem spell DIW, which is <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/dyew-">the etymological root word for "sky"</a> ... it's behind the Latin word deus, the French dieu etc).
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
This part of the poem reminded me of the assumptions that were circulating about Lewis Carroll's obsession with Alice when I was in graduate school. This was after the world learned that Carroll's extensive collection of photographs Carroll had taken included thirty nude photos of little girls, including Alice. One pose was of her clothed, but in an off the shoulder dress in a sensually suggestive pose. Some pooh pooh the implication of those photos, saying that it was a common practice in Victorian times to photograph children nude to celebrate their innocence (which I doubt) but knowing about the existence of the photos has given me the creeps about him.
These three lines seem to me to be the heart of the poem. The rest reads like wafty romanticism, but these seem to be saying something real.
Yes, he is mostly making the puzzle, and the poem serves that largely at the sacrifice of its own seriousness as a poem. But I think you're right that those lines get at the heart of an impulse that puzzle-making doesn't serve.
A confession: I've never read the Alice books. As a child I found the Disney version disturbing and never wanted to pursue the acquaintance. Maybe it's time, in my old age, to rectify that. I've certainly been delighted by bits and pieces seen here and there. And frequently had recourse to Humpty Dumpty's "The question is which is to be master--that's all."
Also I love this poem.
The summer I was nine, I had a neurotic fear of falling asleep and kept myself up every night until daylight reading a number of books on repeat. Through the Looking-Glass, bizarrely, was one of them (another was a big anthology of animal stories that included a bit about a praying mantis by Gerald Durrell, whose name meant nothing to me at the time --- it was not the scene from Birds, Beasts, and Relatives where the praying mantis and the lizard fight to the death, fortunately). I don't know why I found Through the Looking-Glass comforting. Maybe it was just that I'd read it before that summer, and familiarity was comforting. At any rate, all my thoughts about it are bound up with the weirdness of those nights when sitting up with very strange imaginative company was preferable to falling asleep.
But I did also read them with my children, who were entertained by their cleverness.
That sounds like a horrible experience. And I'm wondering if those books gave you weird dreams when you finally did get to sleep.
I don't know --- I barely remember sleeping at all (fortunately at nine you're pretty resilient . . .). I do remember how awful the anxiety was, though, and how reading was a lifeline through it, even when the reading was really weird and --- you would think --- not at all comforting in terms of its subject matter. I read Dracula in the wee hours at my cousins' house at roughly the same stage, if that tells you anything.
Impressive that you were capable of reading Dracula at that age. I don't think I could have. I read it sometime in my teens and found it really scary, even though I was reading it in broad daylight on a summer day. Reading it again in middle age I was a bit disappointed that it didn't seem as scary...I guess I was jaded. But I thought it was better than I expected in literary quality.
In my mid twenties, when I was coming out of a period of serious anxiety, I read a couple of H.P. Lovecraft books while alone at night in the office of an otherwise deserted lumber yard where I was working as night watchman. I cannot fathom now why I did it or why/how it did not reduce me to paralyzed terror. But it didn't, and I enjoyed the books. I think I may have been sort of testing myself, to see if I could master the anxiety, if it returned.
I don't think I read it well, in terms of understanding what was going on, which was probably a mercy. No idea why I picked it up, of all the books on the shelf in their house.
It seems his story starts and end with Alice, a world all her own.
There's a good novel about Alice called "Alice I Have Been", by Melanie Benjamin.
It is probably stochastic, but I note that, in addition to the acrostic running down the opening lines of the whole poem, the <em>second</em> words in the first four lines spell out BOAT acrostically. Maybe that's deliberate? (Less likely is that the second words in the last three lines of the poem spell DIW, which is <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/dyew-">the etymological root word for "sky"</a> ... it's behind the Latin word deus, the French dieu etc).
Well spotted! Your eye for puzzle and pattern is much keener than mine.