Logical Illogic in Wonderland

Order is the greatest which holds in suspension the most disorder, holds it in such a precarious balance that threatens its overthrow. So said the poet Stanley Kunitz. 

If ever there was a man whose right and left brain spoke to each other, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was the guy. A true polymath, he was equal parts Dionysian and Euclidean; his own mirror image as if he had walked through the looking glass. He was an ordained minister, a photographer whose work hung in the Royal Academy, wrote eleven books on math and most famously two children's books best read by adults. 

Carroll found the absurdity in Victorian convention through language, a kind of order turned on its head into a chaos of serious fun as when his Jabberwocky burbles his ambles. and before you can make sense of it off he goes galumphing. 

Was there a subtext or was he on a madcap romp? I think his genius was the way he hid a sobering agenda. Was the Mad Hatter, for example, afflicted by the toxic mercury used in the millinery trade? There is a menagerie in the garden with dandelions, snapdragons and tiger lillies. Well-named for benign menace. It is a Peaceable Kingdom in mid 19th century England....or is it?

In poetry one can assume each word has been weighed and carries with it a secondary reference. When Lewis Carroll mentioned qualities of sand in his Walrus and the Carpenter poem he may have been thinking about the sand in an hourglass which is code for mortality and how he would miss Alice as she left childhood and innocence behind.

Words are for leaping in some poets’ hands. Rub them together and sparks fly. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax and Cabbages and Kings When Dodgson / Carroll brings in Tweedledee and Tweedledum as mirror images, could he not be speaking of his two selves, Dodgson the math and logic professor and Carroll, the playful spinner of yarns? Add to this a third self, the social satirist taking a swipe at British Imperialism. And then there may be lurking a pedophile but let's not go there.

 Consider the Walrus and Carpenter landing on a beach where the sun is shining at night. Sounds a lot like another colony in a distant part of the Empire upon which the sun never sets. Not to belabor the point but those shoes and ships and sealing wax are all part of Victorian civility along with cabbages and kings. Gobbling oysters is what colonists do to native populations. It is all about domination and those cunning settlers.

Can a conservative, devout, tradition-loving Oxford professor with a penchant for postulates and proofs also write so-called nonsense verse translated into seventy languages which hides, within the lines, a disparaging view of the establishment? Of course, we contain multitudes and that is what poetry can do. Shine a light upon a dark corner of society which would be deemed subversive in a more frontal attack?

On the other hand, maybe there is no need for cryptic messages. I don't want to analyze it to death. Carroll's poem stands on its own walrus feet. Millions have read it since publication in 1871, finding delightful bafflement in its illogical logic.