This child-like verse of Victorian author, Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), is often described as the greatest of English nonsense poems. The suggestive effects of its internal and end rhymes, repetition, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia, together with tantalising word inventions, hold an immediate charm.

However, might this playing with the sound and meanings of words suggest something more than just innocent nonsense? Said Alice:

“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!”

–Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Ch.1

The innocent nonsense, as Alice sensed, is darkened by the contrasting plain English injunction: ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!…’ Indeed, this expression of adult fears and anxieties is soon realised though happily resolved.

The interviewees are Michael Donaghy, Sophie Hannah, Roger McGough and Clare Pollard.