Poetry Session – June 16, 2023

 

Collage of Readers on Zoom

We had ten poets represented, five American, three British, and one each from Russia and Argentina. The only translated poems were those of Pasternak from  Russian, and Borges from Spanish.

The poem chosen by Thomo, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is from the 1939 book of poems by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Its  presentation in modern times occurred when the book was turned into the 1981 musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The most famous song in the musical was Memory, adapted from the Eliot poem with lyrics by the musical's director Trevor Nunn. Memory is sung primarily by the character Grizabella as a melancholic remembrance of her glamorous past, and as a plea for acceptance.

Elaine Page as Grizabella in the musical Cats

The enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina is best known for his short stories in Ficciones and his essays on various subjects. Every reader will be transported by reading his short story The Library of Babel which begins:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. 

But at this poetry session we tasted a poem of Borges in which he successively refines the concept of a tiger, having never seen one,  

conjuring in my poem

is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows

– and thus

creates a fiction, not a living creature,

not one of those who wander on the earth.

The Other Tiger

The venerable Robert Frost who doesn’t like walls was about this very task of mending one. Each spring they find gaps from fallen boulders in the low stone walls between their houses and attempt to repair the gaps:

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

Robert Frost and a wall

Apparently the adage ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ urges them on to complete a task, which is actually redundant to the aim of trespassing for there are no cows to wander across. Frost philosophically reminds the reader

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

Boris Pasternak, whose poems we’ve read before, reappeared when KumKum read a poem out of his famous novel, Doctor Zhivago. The poem is titled Parting and we are reminded of the line from our recent Shakespeare session when Juliet confides to her lover Romeo that 

… Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say “Good night” till it be morrow.

But the occasion of Pasternak’s poem is the final parting, out of many in the novel, between Lara and Yury, the doctor, who also writes poems; he is left alone in the deserted house and muses –

In years of strife, in times which were

Unthinkable to live in,

Upon a wave of destiny

To him she had been driven,

…

And now, so suddenly, she'd left.

What power overrode them?

The last parting of Yuri and Lara in Doctor Zhivago

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar – May 23, 2023

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar - First Edition

Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya is the background to this novel, set in the days after he had taken power in a 1969 coup against the monarchy backed by the West. His aim was to set up and implement an ‘Islamic socialism’, to which end he nationalised the western-controlled oil industry and used the state revenues to bolster the military and implement social programs like housing, healthcare and education. But power corrupts and soon he was in the dire business of squelching dissent internally and funding foreign militants.

Colonel Gaddafi in his golden braid

The novel is a kind of bildungsroman, and follows the plight of Suleiman, a young boy whose father, though a prosperous import businessman, supports anti-Gaddafi activities. His young mother, Najwa, is his comforter in the home, and outside it, his best friend Kareem and his father’s friend Moosa are the people he can look to for escape from fear and panic.

We are given a historical perspective by Usthath Rashid, a university professor who moves with his son Kareem next door to Suleiman’s home. Libyan history dates to  the time when the Phoenicians from present-day Lebanon settled in the north-west corner on the coast, and it was later expanded by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus to form the port of Leptis Magna (now called Al-Khums) in 200 CE.

Leptis Magna – Severan Basilica

The dramatic highpoint of the book is when Usthath Rashid after public interrogations is led to his execution. The crowd are rabid, being incited by the regime to condemn a traitor to Libyan socialism. His own father has disappeared and that too induces a sense of panic in the young Suleiman’s heart. Ultimately, his parents smuggle him off to Cairo where he grows up and becomes a pharmacist under the care of Judge Yaseen, Moosa’s father. The book peters out in Cairo. There is no great return to Libya possible, nor any desire.

A Libyan dissenter Shaheed Sadiq Shwehdi executed in public at minute 2:10 of video

Clearly the autocratic regime of Gaddafi and the suppression of dissent are the thrust of the book, showing how it affected ordinary people, and caused the multitudes to fall in line. In the end we have to remember also that Libya was bombed in 1986, supposedly in retaliation against terrorism, and Gaddafi was killed by US, UK, and France acting in concert. They sowed the mayhem and civil war that continues to this day.

Romeo and Juliet, a Shakespearean Evening – April 25, 2023

 

Poster  of the 1968 film directed by Franco Zeffirelli

Romeo and Juliet was written by William Shakespeare before he was thirty. As usual with him the story was adapted from an existing one written by an Italian, Matteo Brandello, and translated into English a few years before Shakespeare was born. Again, as usual, after borrowing the plot he expanded it by developing additional characters and converting it into the poetic form of blank verse that ran through his oeuvre. The poetry is bewitching in many places and adds to the dramatic effect. He uses all his resources – sonnets, heroic couplets, striking metaphors, and puns. He adds comedy into the mix to heighten the effect and provide the entertainment that people craved when they came to the Globe Theatre.

Mercutio says, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man,” introducing a pun on ‘grave’ at a not very comedic moment when Mercutio has just been stabbed and knows that he is about to die.

Many expressions in the play have entered into the common discourse of English-speakers, and remain current four and a half centuries later, such as
What’s in a name?

But Shoba pointed out that P.G. Wodehouse was a constant quoter of Shakespeare, whom he called “brother-pen” in his novels. For instance, he uses Mercutio’s description of his wound:

No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as
a church door, but ’tis enough.

in several of his novels to describe a person’s income; a trap; an oak chest, etc.

And the line from Talitha’s passage in which Abraham asks Sampson (servants of the rival families) about a supposed insult:

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

– even this finds its way into P.G. Wodehouse, who was a veritable repository of Shakespeare quotes, hundreds of which are sprinkled throughout his works. For a complete tracking down of allusions to Shakespeare in P.G. Wodehouse see:

https://www.madameulalie.org/annots/pgwsqa.html

                                  

Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968) by Zeffirelli

Perhaps the most sensuous and beautifully filmed version of Romeo and Juliet is the one directed by Franco Zefirelli. The costuming was a stunning recreation of medieval Verona. The actors are as young as the play supposes, and take on their parts with a naturalness that makes everything come alive. The music too (composed by Nino Rota) was hauntingly beautiful with this signature theme song (lyrics by Eugene Walter, voice Glen Weston):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mvaw3FoUec

A rose will bloom
It then will fade
So does a youth
So does the fairest maid

Shakespeare being Shakespeare cannot avoid the bawdy in his plays, probably out of the need to relate to the various classes of people attending the theatre, from groundlings to nobles. Take a look at this banter among servants, who draw their sword, itself a figure of speech for the penis:

Sampson.
when I have fought with the men I will be cruel with the maids,
I will cut off their heads.

Gregory.
The heads of the maids?

Sampson.

Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.

In the classic glossary compiled by Eric Partridge in 1947 titled Shakespeare’s Bawdy, we learn the full reach and extent of the use of erotic imagery prevalent throughout Shakespeare’s works; one can only have an incomplete understanding of his plays without an acquaintance with his enormous vocabulary on the animal spirits of mankind, and how they are clothed in metaphors and images of the male and female bodies.

You can read here some of the risqué double entendres that are sprinkled throughout the otherwise dewy romantic play – from Mercutio’s “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon” (Act 2, Scene 4) to the Nurse’s “your love / Must climb a bird's nest soon when it is dark” (Act 2, Scene 5). In Shakespeare’s case it extends even to French – in Act 3, Scene 4 of Henry V , Princess Katherine receives a memorable language lesson almost entirely in French from Alice, her maid-in-waiting, on the English names for parts of the body, which in Katherine’s French for ‘foot’ and ‘gown’, are easy to confuse with French vulgarisms.

One reader raised the agonised question why Shakespeare had turned the wonderful account he gives of youthful passion into a dark tragic ending. As in Hamlet numerous deaths pile on toward the ending. It is not any fatal flaw of Romeo that results in tragedy, but a combination of two circumstances: 

1. He reluctantly fights and kills Tybalt of the house of Capulets and is banished, and 

2. Fate decrees he should not receive the message sent by Friar Lawrence about Juliet being under the influence of a potion that fakes death, while not actually being dead.

The greatest tales of love that survive in world literature are either cases of unrequited love, of separated lovers, or those that end in the death of the lovers.

Orpheus glances back at Eurydice, 1806 oil painting by Christian Stub

Take Orpheus and Eurydice, the ancient Greek myth, narrated by the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid. Eurydice once dead, could be revived by the music of Orpheus who goes in search of her with his lyre, but she is sundered forever by a fateful backward glance as he brings her back from Hades.

The account of the actual potent love of Héloïse for her teacher Abelard a thousand years ago in France, survives in the wondrous letters he is forced to address to a woman who is now beyond his reach in a cloister.

In the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde the two mistakenly drink a love potion, but are nevertheless separated in life until Tristan’s death.

Laila and her obsessed lover Majnun, is a story of Arab origin made epic by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. Laila dies of heartbreak from not being able to see her beloved. Majnun was later found dead in the wilderness in near Layla's grave. He had carved three verses of poetry on a rock near the grave, which are the last three verses attributed to him.

                           

Dante meets Beatrice at a bridge in Florence

Dante, after meeting Beatrice and being greeted by her on a bridge over the river Arno in Florence, forever remembered her in his Vita Nuova and later in the classic The Divine Comedy Beatrice assumes the role of his guide to the next world.

Life of Pi -Yann Martel - March 20,2023

2001 first edition of Life of Pi, published by Alfred A. Knopf

A tale of survival on a lifeboat for 227 days by a boy who learns to train a tiger who is his mate on the lifeboat. The tale is prefaced by the godly yearnings of a young boy who decides that the Threefold Way suits him best: being Hindu, Muslim and Christian all at once.

The Golden Rule unites religions

He is given the name Piscine Molitor by his father, an excellent swimmer, because that was the name of the most wonderful swimming pool in all of Paris. Why Paris – because he lived in the French colony, Pondicherry, which sent its award winning students to study in France.

Piscine Molitor Paris after renovation in 2015

But the humiliating sibilance of piss in his name caused him to drop it in favour of the shorter Pi, and then a Gujarati surname Patel just to confuse his future enemies. He takes care to point out a peculiarity, namely, that Pi, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is an irrational number. But had he been tutored a bit more, he would have learned that it was even more unfathomable: a transcendental number, and that would have given a boost to his search for the divine.

Calculation of approximations to the transcendental number Pi by successive generations of Indian Mathematicians

But the divine was not keeping him company when he set out with his parents for Canada, the only known case of refugees seeking asylum there from Mrs Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency in 1975. En route a shipwreck occurs in which the animals they were transporting aboard the SS Tsimtsum, are thrown on the seas and a few (a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger) are stowed away with Pi on a well-provisioned lifeboat.

Zebra, Orang-utan, Hyena, and Bengal tiger with Pi in the lifeboat

The prey-predator relationship goes to work to reduce their numbers and ultimately Pi is left with the Bengal tiger (who has the unlikely name of Richard Parker, after a shikari who hunted tigers) with only a tarpaulin to separate them. This is the ultimate matchup to decide who will be the Alpha male.

There is also the mundane task of assuaging hunger and thirst. Perhaps the most Robinson Crusoe-like part of the story is Pi’s slow education by trial and error, with a great deal of improvisation, on how he went about getting food and drink from the ocean and the sky using various crude implements he devised. Flying fish, turtle-meat, dorados, and the all-important rain-water collection apparatus (an inverted umbrella) provide sustenance.

A gaff – A large iron hook attached to a pole or handle and used to land large fish

Ships sail very close and yet Pi could not alert them with flares. They chance upon the most fantastic island, a huge living flotsam of an unknown species of tree/plant, that sucks up sea-water and desalinates it by osmotic action, forming pools of fresh water on its surface and having a single species of fauna: meerkats.

The island –  Pi is astonished  ‘I know I will never know a joy so vast as I experienced when I entered that tree’s dappled, shimmering shade and heard the dry, crisp sound of the wind rustling its leaves’

The meerkats multiply and climb the vegetal heights at night. From time to time they get devoured by the mysterious all-pervading carnivorous plant. Not to fear: plant and meerkats thrive and multiply nevertheless.

Meerkats

We are left with this as the only curiosity to be followed up. They are not rescued, but wash up unceremoniously on the coast of Mexico and the end fizzles out like a damp squib with Pi being interviewed by two Japanese on behalf of the insurers of the vessel that was lost at sea, perhaps in an explosion.

The film of the novel was made by the well-known director Ang Lee in a 2012 adventure-drama film, whose screenplay was written by David Magee. It stars Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall, Tabu and Adil Hussain in lead roles.

Tabu (Tabassum Fatima Hashmi) acts as Gita Patel, mother of Pi Patel in the film

Poetry Session - February 16, 2023

W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne was a great Irish romance.

W.B Yeats had one great romance in his life, pursuing the fiery activist Maud Gonne and proposing to her three times, being turned down each time. As his lifelong muse she inspired several of his poems. When Yeats told her he wasn’t happy without her, she replied: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”   

The Wild Swans at Coole which Devika recited has these wonderful lines about swans, who reportedly mate for life:

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still

Amy Lowell – Garden by Moonlight

Amy Lowell in a quiet poem presented by Arundhaty speaks of a Garden by Moonlight – besides flowers, there are animals and insects too. A vision of her dead mother appears:

Then you come …

Quiet like the garden

And white like the alyssum flowers,

… do you see those orange lilies?

They knew my mother,

But who belonging to me will they know

When I am gone.

Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'A Dream Within A Dream' questions the nature of reality and human existence

Edgar Allan Poe has a meditation on life as maya. His poem A Dream Within a Dream has the unmistakable sound and rhythm of his great poems; it was rendered by Geetha with great understanding. By the sandy shore the poet grasps at grains of golden sands and wonders 

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

… can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

He meditates finally  

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

One of the poets recited was Christopher Reid, who lost his wife to cancer after 35 years of marriage and felt totally lost. He writes about his Conundrum as a widower in a mini poem by that name that Joe intoned:

I’m the riddle to an answer:

I’m an unmarried spouse,

a flesh and blood revenant,

my own ghost inhabitant

of an empty house.

Kanakakunnu Palace, Trivandrum – the second edition of the Hay Festival was held there 17-19 Nov, 2011 and Simon Armitage was among the poets who presented poems.

We had a poem from KumKum by the current Poet Laureate of UK, Simon Armitage, whom she met in 2011 at the Hay Festival in Trivandrum; she heard him recite this very poem, The Shout.  He is a prolific Poet who takes his responsibilities to compose for royal occasions seriously – with happy results. As it turned out Pamela too lighted on the same poet, filling the evening with two more nature poems.

Vikram Seth – The Humble Administrator’s Garden cover

Priya chose a poem from Vikram Seth, harking back to his student days in China when he was gathering data for an Economics doctorate. There in the town of Suzhou he chanced on the ancient park laid out on classical lines by a high official who relinquished his career and built a garden to meditate in and there live frugally. There is a Chinese saying: in the sky there is heaven, on Earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou (pronounced su-jow). VS brings to bear his observant eye in describing the quiet pleasures of Suzhou garden, now a UNESCO Heritage site:

As magpie flaps back to pine.

A sparrow dust rolls, fluffs, and cheeps.

The humans rest in a design:

One writes, one thinks, one moves, one sleeps.

As often, VS writes in the sonnet form, using iambic tetrameter, following the pattern of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which he was to adopt later for his tour-de-force in verse, The Golden Gate.

Anti-war poems by Denise Levertov, a passionate advocate of peace and justice

A wonderful poem, Making Peace, by Denise Levertov seemed especially relevant in our time when bombs and missiles are raining devastation in Europe, and the belligerents have yet to consider the alternative of peace.

Levertov writes –

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses …

That seems to be the key: to stand back, pause, and ponder – weigh the suffering of blown limbs and snuffed out lives against the necessary compromise that will gain a peace, fragile, but still achievable.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – January 30, 2023

 First Edition of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ signed by Ray Bradbury, published by Ballantine Books in 1953

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, and one of his best works. A Dystopia (opposite is Utopia) is a place where everything is as bad as possible. The novel presents a future American society set some time in the 2040s where all books are outlawed and ‘firemen’ burn them if they are found. The novel’s tagline explains the title as ‘the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns.’

Fireman book-burner pictured with his kerosene flame-thrower on the cover of an edition of Fahrenheit 451

The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his job, and the society he lives in, after a series of encounters with a mysterious young girl named Clarisse, and a retired professor named Faber. Montag begins to secretly read books and becomes more and more aware of the oppressive nature of his society. He eventually joins a group of rebels who are working to preserve books and the knowledge they contain. The novel explores themes of censorship, the dangers of conformism, and the power of literature. Bradbury wrote the novel as a reaction to the McCarthyite political climate of the 1950s and as a warning about the dangers of censorship and the suppression of dissenting ideas.

Such trends are by no means things of the past. The Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris comes to mind. Though it is not strictly an issue of dissension or censorship, it certainly is one of intolerance. In the past year more than 1500 books have been banned in US school districts, mainly books on race and LGBTQ issues.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Charlie-Hebdo-shooting

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/book-bans-pen-america-school-districts

Even today in India authorities attempt to use the police to squelch the expression of works critical of the government. This is contrary to the latitude given in the Constitution to a free press and to voice opinions that dissent from the majority (peacefully, of course). Many writers face the fate of Perumal Murugan who was hounded by Hindutva and caste-based groups which demanded a ban on his book Madhorubhagan, saying it was derogatory in its depiction of women and rituals. See:

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/exclusive-censors-voice-within-me-now-says-writer-perumul-murugan-1448981

Most recently a BBC documentary was not banned, but its exhibition was suppressed in many locations, including educational institutions, by using the police to interfere.

It is well to remember what Salman Rushdie, himself the object of severe threats from Iranian mullahs, said: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

Salman Rushdie – After a near-fatal stabbing on Aug 11, 2022 — and decades of threats — the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy has emphasised that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and is essential for the functioning of a free and open society. She has also stressed the importance of protecting the rights of writers, journalists, and other artists to express their ideas freely, and the need to create an environment where dissenting voices can be heard.

 

It is an interesting fact that in 1954, the year after the novel was published, it was serialised in – of all places – Playboy magazine, helping it to reach an even wider audience.

‘Come on, woman!’ The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montag

The biographer Sam Weller has noted that Bradbury predicted a raft of later technological developments in Fahrenheit 451, among them flat-screen televisions, iPod earbuds, Bluetooth headsets, ATMs, and rolling news. Even Facebook – given that people converse via a digital ‘wall’ in Bradbury’s novel – seems to have been prophetically prefigured in this novel. 

Humorous Poems _ Dec 14, 2022

 

                                 

Humour of every variety and form, extending even to the hallowed sonnet and the Bard, were chosen by the readers to exemplify the kind of verse that turns a wry smile at the corner of one’s lips, if not an outright guffaw. Thus Sonnet 138 of Shakespeare with its puns (‘Therefore I lie with her and she with me’) excites the mind as much as it thrills the funny bone.

Devika chose a poem that confessed the woes of a regular churchgoer in a village in Wales who had tried to keep his eyes from straying to the eligible young women who attended services at the local parish church. They cursed him for his adulterous looks and the poor fellow, in spite of his staring, never managed to get a girl, and remained forever ‘wry–necked without a mate.’

We met the old woman who swore to ‘wear purple with a red hat’ in 2013 when Amita Palat recited Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning. But did we know that this poem became the rallying cry of a society for women’s freedom, called the Red Hat Society? Sue Ellen Cooper of Fullerton, California, gave her friend a vintage red fedora and a copy of Warning for her 55th birthday. She went on to found the popular Red Hat Society; at  their public gatherings the women wore red hats and purple outfits!

 Jenny Joseph – When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

             

P.G Wodehouse was the author of a poem full of humour and indignation – an offended writer shoots the printer who committed intolerable misprints of his text. The judge at the trial sympathises because he has had similar dismal encounters; he quashes the jury’s verdict and dismisses the case in splendid rhyme:

I hereby quash and override
The jury's verdict. Gosh!' he cried.
‘Give me your hand. Yes, I insist,
You splendid fellow! Case dismissed.’

Poems by Anonymous have been famous, but we have not met a Mr. Nobody before in verse who does such mischief that cannot be traced to any living person. KumKum introduced the humorous verse of the unknown author. However we do recall Emily Dickinson’s short poem:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Reminds one that the poet had anticipated the purpose of much of social media today, such as Twitter.

Group pic 

                                               

Pamela in her lion’s head outfit gave voice to the little boy who visited the zoo and got swallowed by a lion. Albert’s Return is a hilarious poem in which we witness the parents of the unfortunate boy, about to receive the insurance cover on his life policy, when the mother tells the agent who has come to collect the monthly premium:

Our Albert's been et by a lion;
You've got to pay us for a change!

Priya recited a poem conveying the regret of a girl who didn’t listen to her mother, and neglected to care for teeth; she now faces the pain of the dentist’s chair:

If I’d known I was paving the way
…
The murder of fillin’s,
Injections and drillin’s,
I’d have thrown all me sherbet away.

         

Cat Morgan Introduces Himself

                                              

The cat poems of T.S Eliot not only provided relaxation and leisure to the poet and the little children of his friends for whom he wrote it, but they continue to entertain millions who read the poems today, and have seen the phenomenally successful musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based upon the 1939 collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Cat Morgan Introduces Himself  is the final poem and represents a cat who has become the resident watchman in front of Faber & Faber’s London premises in Bloomsbury, where TSE worked as director.

I once was a Pirate what sailed the 'igh seas -
But now I've retired as a com-mission-aire:
And that's how you find me a-taking' my ease
And keepin' the door in a Bloomsbury Square.

We had two poems from the pen of Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardener’s Song and Jabberwocky. Both are pieces of Carroll’s fantastic imagination. In the first a series of hallucinations dogs the subject of the poem and as he surveys various scenes and then recoils when a completely different fantasy is revealed below what appears at first sight:

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
"If this should stay to dine," he said,
"There won't be much for us! 

Hippopotamus descending from the bus

Jabberwocky is an even more high-spirited flight of fancy. The father warns the son:

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

The son was watchful and took care of the Jabberwock:
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

The significant feature of this poem is the invention of new portmanteau words – Lewis Carroll's term for a blend, a word into which are packed the sense (and sound) of two words, e.g. slithy for lithe and slimy. Jabberwocky, a poem from Through the Looking Glass, has words like frabjous, chortle, vorpal, frumious, mimsy, etc. which have all entered the dictionary.