Lewis Carroll, the famed author most notably known for his Alice in Wonderland book series, created a poem, "Jabberwocky", to be included in one of his Alice in Wonderland sequels Though the Looking Glass.  In the book Alice falls down a rabbit hole and enters a parallel universe.  In this parallel universe Alice sees things completely different.  Her experiences and surroundings are inevitably scarier and more intimidating than the world she is used to.  To further drive home this point, he uses the poem to intensify the distinct difference between the world Alice is used to, to her new world down the rabbit hole.  To show this difference, he created the poem "Jabberwocky".  The words on their own would make no sense, but together creates an accurate image in the reader's mind of what the poem is trying to say.  Even though the poem "Jabberwocky" uses unintelligent language used through gibberish, Carroll led to the understanding of the poem by his use of tone, repetition, and combination of legitimate words to better convey the feeling of uneasiness and dread that Alice is feeling at the bottom of the rabbit hole in her whole new world.

Word usage is the most important component of this poem. While some of the text is in plain English, most of the poem is in a form of gibberish.  This creates a certain disconnect with the reader, but even with the disconnect the audience has a sense of what the poem is trying to convey.  Even though most of the words do not make any sense, from the very beginning this poem takes a dark turn.  The reader immediately picks up on the harsh tone and word choice to create an intense, fearful air around the stanzas.  The dark language Carroll uses the phrase "slithy toves (Carroll 31)" in the very first line.  Obviously, these words are not real, but they create a feeling of slyness and nervousness that comes with an intense poem.  He uses words like this throughout the poem to further drive into the reader the feeling of dread and apprehension that the characters in the poem are feeling.  Every word that is chosen has an angry feeling about it.  When Carroll does use proper English, he uses phrases like "Beware the Jabberwock, my son (31)" or "He left it dead, and with its head (31)".  None of these sentences have a happy feeling about them.  He reiterates this feeling of dread over and over again making the reader feel uncomfortable until the very end of the poem.

For example, the ending of the poem is repeated from the first stanza.  This repetition creates an air of mystery around the meaning of the poem.  This can be taken one of two ways.  This can be seen as a foreshadowing of the killing of the Jabberwocky taking place or as the killing itself.  Neither outcome is pleasant, but both show signs of fear in the characters of the poem.  This again creates a mystery surrounding the killing. In the latter form, the repetition of the first stanza, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;/All mimsy were the borogoves,/And the mome raths outgrabe (31)" is meant to confuse the reader. It can mean that even though one Jabberwocky is killed, there could be many more out there. This symbolizes the struggles that Alice is about to face. She will have challenges upon challenges upon challenges to face in her time in the hole and as soon as she completes one, she will have one more to face. Or, in the case of the former, she could have completed the hardest of the challenges and is able to see the light out of her situation. Based on the tone of the poem though, it leads the reader to believe that the Jabberwocky is coming back, and he was not killed to begin with.  His leads back to the sense of the unknown and fear of what is going to happen in the story.  It is shown through cutesy language, but it has a dark meaning behind all of the fake words. His use of alliterations further drives home this point. In each stanza he has at least one alliteration present. These alliterations help steer the reader towards the main point of the stanza. Carroll would like the reader to focus on the alliterations to get the meaning of what the poem was trying to say. In the line " the claws that catch" an alliteration is used to bring the attention to the fight scene at hand. An altercation is about to happen and Carroll is showing how ferocious this beast is and how the reader should be scared of this beast. Alice should also be afraid of the beast at hand. She has challenges upon challenges to face before she will make it back home  if she makes it back home.

The combination of some of these "gibberish" words were in fact made up of common, everyday words to give the readers a hint of what the words could mean. For instance, the word "chortled (31)" was meant to meant to be a cross between "chuckle" and "snort". After this poem and book became popular, this word was brought into everyday use and is now in the English dictionary. Another example of combined words are "frumious (31)" which was a combination of "fuming" and "furious". Being able to combine the words was a way for the author to not only come up with new words, but he was also able to leave the interpretation of the meaning up to the reader. Carroll was very wise in the word choices he created by creating words that could be perceived in meaning by how the reader chose to read the poem. No matter how the reader read the poem though, the majority of the lines had a dark undertone to them. The reader could tell that there was a dark happening going on in the poem. The use of the Jabberwockys symbolized that something evil was afoot. There was no way to see positive in the light of the Jabberwocky. 

Lewis Carroll uses many different ways to bring the tone and the symbolization to the reader's attention. With his wide use of repetition, alliterations, and word choice, Carroll demands the reader's attention and points the focus toward the dark themes of the story and defines how we should feel about them. He creates an air of mystery about what is going on, but the reader can infer that it is not good. In the end, Carroll invented some words we still use today. We can look to him as an interesting author and an inventor of a new "language."

