First Loves: From "Jabberwocky" to "After Apple-Picking"

There are sum of two units types of influences in the life of a writer: those influences that approach so early in childhood, they look to soak into the true marrow of our bones and to condition our interpretation of the universe thereafter; and those that advance a little later, when we can exercise more dominion government of our environment and our answer to it, and have begun to be aware of the strategies of art.

My discovery of poetry-or of-verse-came when I was real young. In 1946, for my eighth birthday, my grandmother gave me a beautiful illustrated transcript of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and from one side the Looking-Glass. This book with its handsome woven fabric cover embossed with bizarre creatures, and the astonished Alice in their midst, was the great treasure of my childhood. This was delight in at first sight. (I may have fallen in delight in with the very concept of volume too.) Like Alice, I plummet headfirst down the rabbit perforation and/or climbed boldly through the mirror into the looking-glass world and, in a manner of speaking, not at any time entirely returned to real life. My heroine was this strangely assured, courageous young girl of about my age I would not have judge with uncertaintyed was of another culture and distinctly of another economic class; I greatest in quantity admired her for her curiosity (which mirrored my own) and for the equanimity with which she stand in front ofed dream- and nightmare situations (as I could at no time have done). Within a hardly any months I'd memorized much of one as well as the other Alice books, and could recite, for anyone willing to listen, nearly all the piece of poetrys

The first Wonderland metrical composition which must be the first metrical composition of my life, looks, strangely, to a contemporary adult organ of vision like experimental verse by (po sibly) e e cummings or William Carlos Williams. This curiosity, which fascinated me as a child and inspired me to a great deal of imitation, is meant to replicate a mouse's drawn out tail, dwindling down the page until its final, mordant words are station in miniature type, hardly readable. In Lewis Carroll's children's classic there is plenteous seemingly incongruous concern with dying and death and being eaten; Wonderland is also regarded with justice, not ordinarily a general [i]or[/i] abstract notion one associates with children. on the contrary here is a seemingly playful piece of poetry that suggests the cruelty and injustice of the world as perceived by means of the mouse (child?) victim, helpless at the hands (or jaws) of the oppressor. The piece of poetry dramatizes a cat named frenzy in his confrontation with an anonymous mouse/victim: "Fury said to/ a mouse, That/ he met/ in the/ house. . " and ends with the cryptic words, "'and/ condemn/ you/ to/ death."' Children's literature, especially in the past, didn't shrink from depictions of brutality and sadism; Lewis Carroll, in whom the child-self abided from one side his celibate lifetime, understood instinctively the child's propensity to laugh at the true things that arouse anxiety, like outrageous injustice, unexpected death, disappearing, being devoured. greatest in quantity of the celebrated Alice piece of poetrys seem whimsical unless you examine them more closely Many depict abrupt outbreaks of temper or reversals of fortune thus swift they appear comic: "Be not on or I'll kick you downstairs"; "Speak roughly to your little boy/ And beat him when he sneezes;/ He single does it to annoy,/ Because he knows it teases." The more blatant the rime the more it appeals to childish ear; single reason why blatant rimes fret us when we're adults and seemingly in ne of more craftiness and modulation in the music of verse

But it was the sharply rimes and accented "Jabberwocky" that made the greatest in quantity profound impression on me. For young children, whose brains are struggling to comprehend language, words are magical in any case; the magic of adults, utterly mysterious; no child can distinguish between "real" words and nonsensical or "unreal" words, and stich like Lewis Carroll's brilliant "Jabberwocky" has the result of both arousing childish anxiety (what do these terrifying words mean?) and placating it (don't worry: you can decode the meaning by means of the context). In The Annotated Alice, by means of Martin Gardner, footnotes for "Jabberwocky" overspread several pages in small type; it's considered the greatest nonsense metrical composition in English. I was fascinated -by the bizarre, covert language and by the poem's dreamlike violent action, depicted in the greatest in quantity hideous of John Tenniel's drawings, of a wild winged monster with a tail like a python and gigantic claws, stand over againsted by a very small lad with a sword. I must have liked it, pensive child that I was, to be told that, "vorpal sword in hand," the young hero quieted "by the Tumtum tree,/ And stood awhile in thought" The entire metrical composition is irremediably imprinted in my memory, who knows why? it's a fantasy of a child's auspicious defense against the (adult) unknown, perhaps. It's a parody of heroic adventure tales. on the other hand I think, for me, it was the language that greatest in quantity fascinated: "One, two! One, two!/ And [i]or[/i] part of to the other and through/ The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!/ He left it dead, and with its head/ He went galumphing back."

How has Lewis Carroll's line of poetry influenced my poetry? Has there been any direct influence at all? It may be that the Alice works have more influenced my philosophical/ metaphysical perspective upon life than my poetry. At the periphery of many of my piece of poetrys and works of fiction, as in the corner of an organ of sight there is often an ultimate part of the grotesque or surreal. As a child as young as eight I may have been imbued with an indelible faculty of perception of playfulness and morbidity, in about equal measure. on the other hand isn't this, Lewis Carroll would inquire pleasantly, simply the way the world is?