Today’s Poem: You Are Old, Father William

Lewis Carroll has some fun with Robert Southey; Alice, down the rabbit hole, fails another test.

John Tenniel, illustration from the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 (Wikimedia Commons)

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You Are Old, Father William

by Lewis Carroll

“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.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
    And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
    Pray, what is the reason of that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
    “I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
    Allow me to sell you a couple.”

“You are old," said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
    For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
    Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth," said his father, “I took to the law,
    And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
    Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
    That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
    What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
    Said his father; “don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!”

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In Chapter Five of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), the titular Alice encounters a hookah-smoking blue caterpillar, who catechizes her about her identity. When asked who she is, Alice responds that she hardly knows anymore, that so many confusing things have happened since she fell down the rabbit hole. As a remedy for her confusion, the caterpillar commands her to recite for him a moral poem. If Alice can say a memorized poem correctly, then she will identify herself, truly, as the person she thinks she is. But if not, then what? 

By this point in the story, the recitation of moral poems is on its way to becoming a conversational motif. On first falling down the rabbit hole, the disoriented Alice tries to recollect herself to herself by reciting from memory a schoolroom poem. That poem is Isaac Watts’s  1715 “Against Idleness and Mischief,” in which the industrious bee figures as a didactic example of how to be good. To her bewilderment and chagrin, Alice hears herself reciting instead “How Doth the Little Crocodile,” a parody of Watts’s poem that replaces the goody-goody bee with the crocodile, whose virtue resides in his being exactly no more and no less than what he is. But who and what is Alice? 

The caterpillar of Chapter Five takes up the same question: “Who are you?” After some quizzing, Alice confesses that she doesn’t know who she is because she can’t “remember things.” The caterpillar responds by demanding a recitation: “Repeat You Are Old, Father William.” Alice, always obliging, folds her hands and begins to recite. 

Lewis Carroll, a.k.a. Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1857 (Wikimedia Commons)

What she means to recite is another instructive schoolroom poem, Robert Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them,” first published in 1799. Like the Watts poem, this earnest work by Southey was a popular choice for recitation by nineteenth-century children, as a means of “making” what was assumed to be a formless character and soul (the Victorian educational pioneer Charlotte Mason objected to this assumption on the grounds that children, being “born persons,” already had fully formed souls, thank you very much).

In six relentlessly bouncy abab quatrains, whose anapestic feet impart some spring to the basic tetrameter-trimeter common-meter template, Southey’s young man exclaims admiringly at the enduring health and virtue of his sire. In return, Father William — modestly, but with some satisfaction — recounts all the sober thoughts of his youth, which have borne the suitably sober fruit of maturity and wisdom. 

But again, the poem Alice means to recite is not the poem Alice does recite. Instead of Southey’s Father William (not exactly a laugh a minute even as a young man), this Father William, springing fully formed from Alice’s lips, exhibits a level of exuberance and manic vigor that mystifies his filial interlocutor at every turn. The only fun thing about Southey’s original is the meter, which seems weirdly out of sync with his ponderous patriarch. In Lewis Carroll’s eight-stanza parody, the same form feels of a piece with the madcap old man, whose exploits include somersaulting in at the door,  crunching up a whole goose “with the bones and the beak” at dinner, and threatening to kick his son downstairs for asking too many annoying questions. 

“That is not right,” says the Caterpillar. But in truth it is right, far more right than Southey’s original, which hardly anybody remembers anymore. In parodying Southey, Carroll has produced a poem whose subject and form belong together completely, whose Father William is the genuine article, fully himself, his identity secure — not because he’s virtuous, but because he is. 

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