Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
Quick answer: Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll analysed: the hero's tale hidden in the nonsense, how the invented words work, and the craft lessons poets can take from it.
Jabberwocky is the most famous nonsense poem in English, and the joke at its heart is that it is not nonsense at all. Alice, finding it in a looking-glass book in 1871, says it seems to fill her head with ideas, only she doesn't know exactly what they are. Every reader since has had the same experience: you cannot define brillig or slithy, yet you follow the story without effort.
A father warns his son about a monster. The son takes his sword, waits by a tree, kills the Jabberwock, and comes home to a hero's welcome. Carroll tells this oldest of tales in words that mostly do not exist, and in doing so gives poets a masterclass in how sound, syntax, and form carry meaning even when the dictionary gives up.
The poem
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carroll, 'Jabberwocky' (1871)
What the poem says
Strip away the strange vocabulary and the plot is a miniature epic in seven quatrains. The first stanza sets a scene: some creatures do something in a place, at a certain time of day. The second is the father's warning, and here the nouns are real enough to bite: beware the Jabberwock, its jaws, its claws, and two further beasts, the Jubjub bird and the Bandersnatch. The third and fourth stanzas give us the quest, the son standing in thought by the Tumtum tree, and the monster's arrival with eyes of flame.
The fifth stanza is the fight, over in four lines, with the blade going snicker-snack. The sixth is the homecoming, the father's joy spilling into exclamations. The seventh repeats the first stanza word for word, closing the frame: the strange world goes on exactly as before, monster or no monster.
That circular ending is worth pausing on. By returning to the opening stanza, Carroll implies both that order is restored and, more slyly, that nothing much has changed. Heroism happens; the toves keep gyring.
How it works
The engine of the poem is grammatical. Carroll keeps every function word in plain English: and, the, in, did, all, his. Only the content words are invented, and each invented word sits in a slot that tells you its part of speech. Slithy must be an adjective, gyre and gimble must be verbs. Your mind supplies plausible meanings because the sentence structure is doing what English sentences always do.
Sound does the rest. Carroll leans on what he called portmanteau words, two meanings packed into one case: he explained slithy as lithe and slimy, and mimsy as flimsy and miserable. Even where he offered no gloss, the phonetics steer you. Words like galumphing feel triumphant and heavy-footed before you think about them, which is why several of Carroll's coinages, chortle among them, entered the dictionary for real.
Formally, the poem is a straight-faced ballad: iambic tetrameter quatrains, rhymed ABAB, with a trimeter final line in most stanzas. The metre is so conventional that the poem reads as a parody of heroic border ballads. Once again, nonsense proves to need stricter form than sense.
Why it lasts
Jabberwocky lasts because it demonstrates something true about language that theorists took another century to articulate: meaning lives in structure and sound as much as in definitions. It is quoted in linguistics lectures and cognitive science papers as often as in classrooms. Humpty Dumpty's confident explication of the first stanza, a chapter later in Through the Looking-Glass, is also literature's best parody of over-confident critics, and every reader of poetry criticism should meet it.
The poem also endures for a simpler reason: it is enormous fun to say. Snicker-snack and frabjous ask to be spoken aloud. Generations of children have memorised it without being asked to, and a poem lodged in that many memories does not fade.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the frame repetition. Opening and closing a poem with the same stanza, or the same image slightly turned, creates a satisfying circle and lets the middle carry all the change. Judges reading for structure notice this shape immediately, and readers feel it even when they cannot name it.
Steal the portmanteau, carefully. Fusing two real words into one new one gives you compressed, original texture: try it for a sound, a weather, a mood that has no exact name. And take the deeper lesson: if your syntax is clear and your rhythm confident, you can afford strangeness in your vocabulary. Most obscure poems fail at the sentence level, not the word level.
What poets can take from this
- Keep function words plain when your content words go strange; grammar is the reader's handrail.
- Build invented words from real roots so their sound suggests their sense.
- Use a strict ballad metre to make wild material feel inevitable.
- Try repeating your opening stanza at the close and see what the middle now means.
- Test every coinage aloud; if it is not fun to say, cut it.
Try it yourself
Write a short ballad about a task or fear in your own life, replacing every key noun and verb with an invented portmanteau word while keeping the grammar perfectly ordinary.
Questions
What is Jabberwocky actually about?
Beneath the invented vocabulary it is a classic hero's tale: a father warns his son about the Jabberwock, the son slays the monster, and he returns to celebration. Many readers also take it as a playful parody of heroic ballads and a demonstration that sound and syntax can carry meaning on their own.
What do the made-up words in Jabberwocky mean?
Carroll explained some as portmanteau words: slithy blends lithe and slimy, mimsy blends flimsy and miserable, and chortle blends chuckle and snort. Others he left undefined, trusting their sound and grammatical position to suggest meaning, which is exactly what happens when you read it.
What meter is Jabberwocky written in?
It is written in ballad-style quatrains of iambic tetrameter, rhymed ABAB, with most stanzas ending in a shorter three-beat line. The conventional metre is deliberate: the familiar form makes the nonsense vocabulary feel coherent.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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