Lewis Caroll's Poem Analysis

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Growing up or Growing Old “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky” is an acrostic poem written by Lewis Carroll in 1871. It is taken from one of Carroll’s most famous works, Through the Looking Glass, which was the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The poem’s surreal tone and colorful imagery sends the reader down a rabbit hole full of mystery and imagination. Consisting of seven three-line stanzas, Carroll’s poem is not quite as long as many but fear not; that’s all it took for me to be entirely consumed by this magnificent poem. It has a very interesting rhyme scheme in which the three lines of each stanza rhyme, but not all of the stanzas rhyme with each other. “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky” is also an acrostic poem, which means that the first letter or word of each line spells out an independent word or message. This also means that it has no meter, as most acrostic poems do not. “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky” has no set meter, as most acrostic poems do not. The genre in which this poem falls is “literary nonsense”; a genre that Carroll himself made very popular, considering almost all of his poems fell into this category. Though nonsensical writing is often stereotyped as just a “form of entertainment,” most nonsensical poetry contains allegories and deep symbolism. For someone to say that Lewis Carroll’s writing had no other purpose than to be entertaining is, in my opinion, completely unfathomable. Carroll lived in the Victorian era, which lasted from 1897 to 1901. Today, this era is seen as a time of “great expansion of wealth, power, and culture" (Landow). With this era came many other changes as well. Because so many people used opium during the Victorian era, it is suggested that this drug greatly influenced Carroll’s writing. The mind altering images brought on by narcotics could have influenced the ideas for Through the Looking Glass. He often sent

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