NOTES

This poem on dreams was also Lewis Carroll's final word on Alice in Wonderland; it appears at the end of THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS.

The poetic constraints Carroll's given himself are so severe they should be insurmountable: constraints on subject matter, structure, rhyme, length, and even line-by-line material:

• The poem's an acrostic riddle containing its own answer: the first letter of each line spells out Alice Pleasance Liddell--the original Alice.
• But it's also an expansion of a centuries-old children's round all native English speakers learn in childhood:

  Row, row, row your boat
  Gently down the stream
  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
  Life is but a dream.

  In this four-part songform, a new voice begins "row, row, row" at each new line, and these staggered melodies all harmonize. Like the poem, such a round is far more complex (and hard to write) than it looks on the page. And the poem's echoes of the round evoke the reader's childhood memories of learning it, adding a strange resonance and authority to native speakers, as if Carroll's poem were centuries old--the true, full, original form of the round.
• That rhyme-scheme! Aaa, bbb... it looks free and easy, but try it yourself and watch your lines sag into doggerel. And it's not aaa bbb ccc ddd eee fff ggg, as it looks at first glance. It's aaa bbb aaa ccc ddd aaa eee. The recurring aaa doesn't hit you over the head, but adds a subtle feeling of closure. A sense of fate?
• Carroll is limited to exactly twenty-one lines, one for each letter of Alice's name; no easy alternatives to those seven three-line stanzas! Yet doesn't he make it seem like a deliberate, inspired choice? These triplets create a strange mood of things left undone, things cut off early--a mood to suit his theme.
• The meaning is as three-layered as the verses: the quintessential Victorian assertion that childhood is innocent; but under that, Carroll's relentless logic concludes that if children have open spirits, adults are waning children, children blighted by autumn. And yet deep under this melancholy--down a rabbit hole, through a looking-glass--is an escape: it's dreams that endure. Of course Carroll knew his Victorian readers, mostly Christian, would read "dreams" as "heaven"; but the melancholy tone hints at his doubt. In the end he may mean simply, sadly, that our ideas and stories and yes, dreams (many bits of the Alice books are from short dreams and especially hypnogogic images (flashes when falling asleep or waking)--what Carroll called "night thoughts") may live on; but not us.
• And this poem has lived on. I mentioned it to a friend, not expecting her to have ever heard of it. She lit up and said:

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

--Chris Wayan

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