Lewis Carroll

The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

Boyish garb, gendered labor

Carroll describes a girl in masculine clothing doing traditionally male work (spade-wielding). This isn't celebration of gender fluidity—it's Victorian anxiety about childhood innocence and the body. The 'garb' matters because it's a costume that temporarily neutralizes her sex.

Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
  Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
    The tale he loves to tell.
Rude spirits of the seething outer strife,

The seething outer strife

Notice the contrast: outside is 'seething' and full of 'strife,' but the child's world is static, pure, simple. Carroll divides reality into two hostile zones—adult commerce vs. childhood refuge.

Spright (archaic)

Carroll uses an obsolete spelling of 'sprite' to mean spirit or essence. The archaic diction reinforces his nostalgia—he's writing in a deliberately old-fashioned register to preserve something he fears is disappearing.

  Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright,
Deem, if you list, such hours a waste of life,
    Empty of all delight!
Chat on, sweet Maid, and rescue from annoy
  Hearts that by wiser talk are unbeguiled.
Ah, happy he who owns that tenderest joy,
    The heart-love of a child!

Heart-love of a child

This phrase appears nowhere else in Victorian poetry. Carroll's neologism 'heart-love' distinguishes childish affection from adult romantic love—it's meant to be innocent, yet the phrasing betrays anxiety about the distinction.

Away, fond thoughts, and vex my soul no more!
  Work claims my wakeful nights, my busy days—

Sunlit shore, repetition

The entire poem repeats twice identically. This structural choice mirrors obsessive memory—the speaker can't move past these moments. The repetition is the form enacting the content: haunting, recursive, trapped.

Albeit bright memories of that sunlit shore
    Yet haunt my dreaming gaze!
Source

Reading Notes

Context: This is Carroll's dedication poem, not from The Hunting of the Snark itself

CONTEXT This poem dedicates *The Hunting of the Snark* (1876) to Gertrude Chataway, a young girl Carroll knew. It's not actually part of the nonsense narrative—it's Carroll's frame, his justification for the book's existence.

Carroll wrote this during a period of intense anxiety about childhood and adulthood. By the 1870s, he was obsessed with photographing young girls in elaborate costumes, and his letters reveal deep conflict about growing up and sexuality. This dedication poem is where that anxiety surfaces most directly.

The poem's repeated structure and its obsessive return to 'that sunlit shore' suggest something unresolved in Carroll's mind. He's not simply celebrating childhood innocence—he's trying to preserve it against time, work, and the 'seething outer strife' of adult life. The poem is less a gift to a child than a confession to himself about what he's losing.

The division between child-time and adult-time

Carroll structures the poem as a clash between two worlds. Stanzas 1-3 present the child's realm: play, storytelling, 'rest on a friendly knee.' Stanza 4 erupts with the adult world: 'Work claims my wakeful nights, my busy days.' The contrast isn't gentle—it's violent. 'Away, fond thoughts, and vex my soul no more' reads as a command to himself, not a peaceful acceptance.

Notice that the adult world is described entirely through absence and negation: work that claims time, thoughts that vex, memories that haunt. Carroll can't describe what adults actually *do*—only what they've lost. The poem's repetition of stanzas 1-3 after stanza 4 suggests the speaker trying to return to the child-world, to undo the rupture that adulthood represents. The structure enacts the impossibility of that return: the words are identical, but the speaker has already been marked by time and work.