The Walrus and the Carpenter

As in all of Lewis Carroll’s works, nonsense is deliberate and inescapable—the poem is, after all, a classic example of the literary nonsense genre. In the novel, Alice encounters the poem of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in the looking-glass world, where everything is reversed from the real world. This reversal features as a motif in the poem from the very beginning, where the sun blazes in the middle of the night, causing the moon to feel upset.

The first stanzas, describing the interaction between the sun and the moon, seemingly have little to do with the story about the Walrus and the Carpenter, but the upside-down setting sets the tone for the rest of the poem. Besides representing Carroll’s trademark silliness, the male sun’s infringement on the female moon’s domain—the night—introduces the themes of Deception and Betrayal and The Exploitation of the Weak by the Powerful, which become central later in the poem when the Walrus and Carpenter set out to deceive the oysters.

Nonsense continues to reign throughout the poem. The Walrus and the Carpenter weep copiously at the sight of all the sand on the beach, for reasons that are never specified.