Taint What You Do. It’s the Way That You Do It.
John Tenniel, The Jaberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, 1871
by Samuel Jay Keyser
In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published one of the most influential collections of poems to come down the English-language pike. The title was Lyrical Ballads and it ushered in Romanticism’s response to the Enlightenment, a kind of harbinger of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. One of the many poems by Wordsworth included in that collection is “The Tables Turned”:
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
So much of poetic criticism focuses on meaning that perhaps, at the outset, we should say a bit about it. Wallace Stevens once replied to Anna Wirtz who had written to him about the meaning of “The Emperor of Ice Cream“: “If the meaning of a poem is its essential characteristic, people would be putting themselves to a lot of trouble about nothing to set the meaning in a poetic form.” The implication of Stevens’ comment is clear enough. Whatever is essential to a poem, it is not meaning. This is clear from “The Tables Turned”, a good poem whose meaning is completely transparent but, if taken seriously, is off the wall.
But how can you take seriously “We murder to dissect” when you think of Isaac Newton’s discovery 100 years earlier of the principle of action at a distance, a principle so powerful and yet so unintuitive from a common sense point of view that he spent the rest of his life trying to prove he was wrong. He called it a mystery. If Newton is arguably the greatest scientist who ever lived, Wordsworth’s paean to anti-intellectualism 100 years after Newton’s stroke of genius ranks him among the foremost of flat-earthers.
But hold on. Wordsworth was not writing a scientific paper. He was writing a poem. He was taking a particular point of view — perhaps one he didn’t really take seriously, a joke written with tongue-in-cheek — and put it into a particular form. In other words, Wordsworth was attending not so much to what he was saying but how he was saying it. And why was he doing that? Presumably to give pleasure rather than impart knowledge. If the latter had been his goal, he would have been much better off, as Stevens’ remark implies, writing a treatise.
There is, however, a poem, even more memorable, I daresay, than “The Tables Turned”, in which, Stevens notwithstanding, meaning or rather the lack thereof is indeed essential. I am thinking of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
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.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
John Tenniel, ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves- Did gyre and gimble in the wabe, 1871
Readers after all do expect a poem to mean something. And Carroll doesn’t disappoint them. But like a magician’s use of misdirection, Carroll has included words that are tantalisingly meaningless, “tantalisingly” because they teeter on the edge of comprehensibility.
Take slithy, for example. It walks like a word. It talks like a word. It looks like word. It has sound. It has what look like parts, slith (think slime) + y (think slimey). It is a portmanteau, as Humpty Dumpty will make clear momentarily. (It could easily be a real, live English adjective.) The thing is it isn’t. Readers, parsing it, are forced to supply their own meaning. That is the fun of it. And because he is playful, not malicious, Carroll shows how it is done in a conversation between Humpty Dumpty and Alice:
Humpty Dumpty interrupted: “There are plenty of hard words there. ‘Brillig’ means four o’clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.”
“That’ll do very well,” said Alice: “and ‘slithy’?”
“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau— there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
“I see it now,” Alice remarked thoughtfully: “and what are ‘toves’?”
“Well, ‘toves’ are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”
“They must be very curious-looking creatures.”
“They are that,” said Humpty Dumpty: “also they make their nests under sun-dials—also they live on cheese.”
“And what’s to ‘gyre’ and to ‘gimble’?”
“To ‘gyre’ is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To ‘gimble’ is to make holes like a gimblet.”
“And ‘the wabe’ is the grass-plot mind a sun-dial, I suppose?’ said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.
“Of course it is. It’s called ‘wabe,’ you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it—”
“And a long way beyond it on each side, “Alice added.
“Exactly so. Well then, ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you). And a ‘borogove’ is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop.”
“And then ‘mome raths’?” said Alice. “I’m afraid I’m giving you a great deal of trouble.”
“Well, a ‘rath’ is a sort of green pig: but ‘mome’ I’m not certain about. I think it’s short for ‘from home’— meaning that they’d lost their way, you know.”
“And what does ‘outgrabe’ mean?”
“Well, ‘outgribing’ is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle: however, you’ll hear it done, maybe—down in the wood yonder—and, when you’ve once heard it, you’ll be quite content. Who’s been repeating all that hard stuff to you?”
“I read it in a book,” said Alice.
John Tenniel, If I’d meant that, I’d have said it, 1897
Unlike “The Tables Turned” where every word wears its heart on its sleeve, “Jabberwocky” provides exotic empty shells of words and challenges you to fill them. And in case you are disinclined to, Carroll offers to do it for you.
I mentioned earlier that “Jabberwocky” provides the reader with meaning, just not all of it. Consider the third and fourth stanzas with the nonsense words blocked out:
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
What’s going on is perfectly clear without the nonsense words, most of them adjectives and therefore merely adding colour to the action. (A vorpal sword is, after all, a sword.)[1]
So, “Jabberwocky” isn’t really a nonsense poem. It would be better described as a “just for fun” poem. For a bona fide nonsense poem you would have to go to Dadaist Hugo Ball’s “Karawane”. He originally performed it at the Café Voltaire in Zürich in 1916. Ball, the founder of Dadaism and of the café, was dressed like a cardboard Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. So attired, this is what he recited:
jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla
grossiga m’pfa habla horem
égiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung
blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa ólobo
hej tatta gôrem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluw ssubudu
tumba ba- umf
kusagauma
ba – umf
Now that is meaningless. Indeed, according to Dada principles, its meaning is its meaninglessness. Next to it, “Jabberwocky” is a monument of lucidity.
Both “Jabberwocky” and “The Tables Turned” are very good poems. Both are quite similar in form. In “The Tables Turned” the metre is the so-called ballad metre with iambic tetrameter lines alternating with iambic trimeter lines. In “Jabberwocky” the ballad metre is truncated slightly. The alternation is limited to the last two lines of each stanza. The rhyme scheme is ABAB in both, again with “Jabberwocky” showing a variation. The sixth stanza’s rhyme scheme is ABCB. Carroll substitutes a line internal rhyme in line C: “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” Both show an easy mastery of the rhymes, none of them forced. The syntax is straightforward. There is very little departure from normal word order and what there is falls trippingly off the tongue.
Despite the formal similarity, in the world of literary commentary, the poems are viewed differently. “The Tables Turned” is treated as a serious poem even though what it is about is nonsense. “Jabberwocky” is treated as a “nonsense” poem even though what it is about is perfectly clear. The truth is both poems are far more alike than one would imagine.
For example, it is an easy matter to Jabberwock “The Tables Turned”:
Up! Mimsy friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! Mimsy friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun above the Jubjub’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the manxone fields has spread,
His first sweet uffish yellow.
Books! ’tis a dull and mimsy strife:
Come, hear the whiffling linnet,
How sweet his tove is! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the Tumtum sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of frabjous wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom galumphing health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a tulgey wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the mome raths can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our frumious intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those vorpal wabes;
Gyre forth, and bring with you a heart
That gimbles and outgrabes.
So what is the upshot of all this?
Sy Oliver and Trummy Young wrote a tune in 1939 called “Taint What You Do. It’s the Way That You Do It.” I think that pretty much sums up what Stevens had in mind. When it comes to poetry, “Taint What You Mean. It’s the Way That You Mean it.”
Note
[1] I am indebted to Ray Jackendoff for conversations enlightening me on the character of Jabberwocky.
About the Author
Samuel Jay Keyser is Peter de Flores emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT. His most recent books include The Mental Life of Modernism, MIT Press, 2020 and Turning Turtle: Memoir of a Man Who Would ‘Never Walk Again,’ 2020. The latter is gratis at turningturtle.pubpub.org. He is editor in chief of Linguistic Inquiry, an MIT Press journal and its sister monograph series. He is a jazz trombonist with The Dixie Sticklers, a Dixieland band and with the avant-garde jazz orchestra, Aardvark, the oldest continuing jazz ensemble in the United States.
