A
fter a while the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all was dead silence, and Alice lifted up her head in some alarm. There was no one to be seen, and her first thought was that she must have been dreaming about the Lion and the Unicorn and those queer Anglo-Saxon Messengers. However, there was the great dish still lying at her feet, on which she had tried to cut the plum-cake, “So I wasn’t dreaming, after all,” she said to herself, “unless—unless we’re all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s my
dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream,” she went on in a rather complaining tone: “I’ve a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!”
At this moment her thoughts were interrupted by a loud shouting of “Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!” and a Knight, dressed in crimson armour, came galloping down upon her, brandishing a great club. Just as he reached her,
1
the horse stopped suddenly: “You’re my prisoner!” the Knight cried, as he tumbled off his horse.
Startled as she was, Alice was more frightened for him than for herself at the moment, and watched him with some anxiety as he mounted again. As soon as he was comfortably in the saddle, he began once more “You’re my—” but here another voice broke in “Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!” and Alice looked round in some surprise for the new enemy.
This time it was a White Knight.
2
He drew up at Alice’s side, and tumbled off his horse just as the Red Knight had done: then he got on again, and the two Knights sat and looked at each other for some time without speaking. Alice looked from one to the other in some bewilderment.
“She’s my
prisoner, you know!” the Red Knight said at last.
“Yes, but then I
came and rescued her!” the White Knight replied.
“Well, we must fight for her, then,” said the Red Knight, as he took up his helmet (which hung from the saddle, and was something the shape of a horse’s head) and put it on.
“You will observe the Rules of Battle, of course?” the White Knight remarked, putting on his helmet too.
“I always do,” said the Red Knight, and they began banging away at each other with such fury that Alice got behind a tree to be out of the way of the blows.
“I wonder, now, what the Rules of Battle are,” she said to herself, as she watched the fight, timidly peeping out from her hiding-place. “One Rule seems to be, that if one Knight hits the other, he knocks him off his horse; and, if he misses, he tumbles off himself—and another Rule seems to be that they hold their clubs with their arms, as if they were Punch and Judy
3
—What a noise they make when they tumble! Just like a whole set of fire-irons falling into the fender! And how quiet the horses are! They let them get on and off them just as if they were tables!’
Another Rule of Battle, that Alice had not noticed, seemed to be that they always fell on their heads; and the battle ended with their both falling off in this way, side by side. When they got up again, they shook hands, and then the Red Knight mounted and galloped off.
“It was a glorious victory, wasn’t it?” said the White Knight, as he came up panting.
“I don’t know,” Alice said doubtfully. “I don’t want to be anybody’s prisoner. I want to be a Queen.”
“So you will, when you’ve crossed the next brook,” said the
White Knight. “I’ll see you safe to the end of the wood—and then I must go back, you know. That’s the end of my move.”
“Thank you very much,” said Alice. “May I help you off with your helmet?” It was evidently more than he could manage by himself: however she managed to shake him out of it at last.
“Now one can breathe more easily,” said the Knight, putting back his shaggy hair with both hands, and turning his gentle face and large mild eyes to Alice. She thought she had never seen such a strange-looking soldier in all her life.
4
He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and he had a queer-shaped little deal box
5
fastened across his shoulders, upside-down, and with the lid hanging open. Alice looked at it with great curiosity.
“I see you’re admiring my little box,” the Knight said in a friendly tone. “It’s my own invention—to keep clothes and sandwiches in. You see I carry it upside-down, so that the rain ca’n’t get in.”
“But the things can get out,
” Alice gently remarked. “Do you know the lid’s open?”
“I didn’t know it,” the Knight said, a shade of vexation passing over his face. “Then all the things must have fallen out! And the box is no use without them.” He unfastened it as he spoke, and was just going to throw it into the bushes, when a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he hung it carefully on a tree. “Can you guess why I did that?” he said to Alice.
Alice shook her head.
“In hopes some bees may make a nest in it—then I should get the honey.”
“But you’ve got a bee-hive—or something like one—fastened to the saddle,” said Alice.
“Yes, it’s a very good bee-hive,” the Knight said in a discontented tone, “one of the best kind. But not a single bee has come near it yet. And the other thing is a mouse-trap. I suppose the mice keep the bees out—or the bees keep the mice out, I don’t know which.”
“I was wondering what the mouse-trap was for,” said Alice.
“It isn’t very likely there would be any mice on the horse’s back.”
“Not very likely, perhaps,” said the Knight; “but, if they do
come, I don’t choose to have them running all about.”
“You see,” he went on after a pause, “it’s as well to be provided for everything.
That’s the reason the horse has all those anklets round his feet.”
“But what are they for?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.
“To guard against the bites of sharks,”
6
the Knight replied. “It’s an invention of my own. And now help me on. I’ll go with you to the end of the wood—What’s that dish for?”
“It’s meant for plum-cake,” said Alice.
“We’d better take it with us,” the Knight said. “It’ll come in handy if we find any plum-cake. Help me to get it into this bag.”
This took a long time to manage, though Alice held the bag open very carefully, because the Knight was so very
awkward in putting in the dish: the first two or three times that he tried he fell in himself instead. “It’s rather a tight fit, you see,” he said, as they got it in at last; “there are so many candlesticks in the bag.” And he hung it to the saddle, which was already loaded with bunches of carrots, and fire-irons, and many other things.
7
“I hope you’ve got your hair well fastened on?” he continued, as they set off.
“Only in the usual way,” Alice said, smiling.
“That’s hardly enough,” he said, anxiously. “You see the wind is so very
strong here. It’s as strong as soup.”
“Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown of?” Alice enquired.
“Not yet,” said the Knight. “But I’ve got a plan for keeping it from falling
off.”
“I should like to hear it, very much.”
“First you take an upright stick,” said the Knight. “Then you make your hair creep up it, like a fruit-tree. Now the reason hair falls off is because it hangs down—
things never fall upwards,
you know. It’s a plan of my own invention. You may try it if you
like.”
It didn’t sound a comfortable plan, Alice thought, and for a few minutes she walked on in silence, puzzling over the idea, and every now and then stopping to help the poor Knight, who certainly was not
a good rider.
Whenever the horse stopped (which it did very often), he fell off in front; and, whenever it went on again (which it generally did rather suddenly), he fell off behind. Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except that he had a habit of now and then falling off sideways; and, as he generally did this on the side on which Alice was walking, she soon found that it was the best plan not to walk quite
close to the horse.
“I’m afraid you’ve not had much practice in riding,” she ventured to say, as she was helping him up from his fifth tumble.
The Knight looked very much surprised, and a little offended at the remark. “What makes you say that?” he asked, as he scrambled back into the saddle, keeping hold of Alice’s hair with one hand, to save himself from falling over on the other side.
“Because people don’t fall off quite so often, when they’ve had much practice.”
“I’ve had plenty of practice,” the Knight said very gravely:
“plenty of practice!”
Alice could think of nothing better to say than “Indeed?” but she said it as heartily as she could. They went on a little way in silence after this, the Knight with his eyes shut, muttering to himself, and Alice watching anxiously for the next tumble.
“The great art of riding,” the Knight suddenly began in a loud voice, waving his right arm as he spoke, “is to keep—” Here the sentence ended as suddenly as it had begun, as the Knight fell heavily on the top of his head exactly in the path where Alice was walking. She was quite frightened this time, and said in an anxious tone, as she picked him up, “I hope no bones are broken?”
“None to speak of,” the Knight said, as if he didn’t mind breaking two or three of them. “The great art of riding, as I was saying, is—to keep your balance properly. Like this, you know—”
He let go the bridle, and stretched out both his arms to show Alice what he meant, and this time he fell flat on his back, right under the horse’s feet.
“Plenty of practice!” he went on repeating, all the time that Alice was getting him on his feet again. “Plenty of practice!”
“It’s too ridiculous!” cried Alice, losing all her patience this time. “You ought to have a wooden horse on wheels, that you ought!”
“Does that kind go smoothly?” the Knight asked in a tone of great interest, clasping his arms round the horse’s neck as he spoke, just in time to save himself from tumbling off again.
“Much more smoothly than a live horse,” Alice said, with a little scream of laughter, in spite of all she could do to prevent it.
“I’ll get one,” the Knight said thoughtfully to himself. “One or two—several.”
There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on again. “I’m a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, the last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather thoughtful?”
“You were
a little grave,” said Alice.
“Well, just then I was inventing a new way of getting over a gate—would you like to hear it?”
“Very much indeed,” Alice said politely.
“I’ll tell you how I came to think of it,” said the Knight. “You see, I said to myself ‘The only difficulty is with the feet: the head
is high enough already.’ Now, first I put my head on the top of the gate—then the head’s high enough—then I stand on my head—then the feet are high enough, you see—then I’m over, you see.”
“Yes, I suppose you’d be over when that was done,” Alice said thoughtfully: “but don’t you think it would be rather hard?”
“I haven’t tried it yet,” the Knight said, gravely; “so I ca’n’t tell for certain—but I’m afraid it would
be a little hard.”
He looked so vexed at the idea, that Alice changed the subject hastily. “What a curious helmet you’ve got!” she said cheerfully. “Is that your invention too?”
The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the saddle. “Yes,” he said; “but I’ve invented a better one than that—like a sugar-loaf.
8
When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it always touched the ground directly. So I had a very
little way to fall, you see—But there was
the danger of falling into
it, to be sure. That happened to me once—and the worst of it was, before I could get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it was his own helmet.”
The Knight looked so solemn about it that Alice did not dare to laugh. “I’m afraid you must have hurt him,” she said in a trembling voice, “being on the top of his head.”
“I had to kick him, of course,” the Knight said, very seriously. “And then he took the helmet off again—but it took hours and hours to get me out. I was as fast as—as lightning, you know.”
“But that’s a different kind of fastness,” Alice objected.
The Knight shook his head. “It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure you!” he said. He raised his hands in some excitement as he said this, and instantly rolled out of the saddle, and fell headlong into a deep ditch.
Alice ran to the side of the ditch to look for him. She was rather startled by the fall, as for some time he had kept on very well, and she was afraid that he really was
hurt this time. However, though she could see nothing but the soles of his feet, she was much relieved to hear that he was talking on in his usual tone. “All kinds of fastness,” he repeated: “but it was careless of him to put another man’s helmet on—with the man in it, too.”
“How can
you go on talking so quietly, head downwards?” Alice asked, as she dragged him out by the feet, and laid him in a heap on the bank.
The Knight looked surprised at the question. “What does it matter where my body happens to be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head-downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.”
“Now the cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did,” he went on after a pause, “was inventing a new pudding during the meat-course.”
“In time to have it cooked for the next course?” said Alice. “Well, that was
quick work, certainly!”
“Well, not the next
course,” the Knight said in a slow thoughtful tone: “no, certainly not the next course.
”
“Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn’t have two pudding-courses in one dinner?”
“Well, not the next
day,” the Knight repeated as before: “not the next day.
In fact,” he went on, holding his head down, and his voice getting lower and lower, “I don’t believe that pudding ever was
cooked! In fact, I don’t believe that pudding ever will
be cooked! And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent.”
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“What did you mean it to be made of?” Alice asked, hoping to cheer him up, for the poor Knight seemed quite low-spirited about it.
“It began with blotting-paper,” the Knight answered with a groan.
“That wouldn’t be very nice, I’m afraid—”
“Not very nice alone,
” he interrupted, quite eagerly: “but you’ve no idea what a difference it makes, mixing it with other things—such as gunpowder and sealing-wax. And here I must leave you.” They had just come to the end of the wood.
Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding.
“You are sad,” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “let me sing you a song to comfort you.”
“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
“It’s long,” said the Knight, “but it’s very, very
beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the tears
into their eyes, or else—”
“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
“Or else it doesn’t, you know.
10
The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’
”
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called.
The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’
”
“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song
is called’?” Alice corrected herself.
“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song
is called ‘Ways and Means’11
but that’s only what it’s called,
you know!”
“Well, what is
the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a Gate’
:
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and the tune’s my own invention.’
So saying, he stopped his horse and let the reins fall on its neck: then, slowly beating time with one hand, and with a faint smile lighting up his gentle foolish face, as if he enjoyed the music of his song, he began.
Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half-dream, to the melancholy music of the song.
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“But the tune isn’t
his own invention,” she said to herself: “it’s ‘I give thee all, I can no more.’
” She stood and listened very attentively, but no tears came into her eyes.
As the Knight sang the last words of the ballad, he gathered up the reins, and turned his horse’s head along the road by which they had come. “You’ve only a few yards to go,” he said, “down the hill and over that little brook, and then you’ll be a Queen—But you’ll stay and see me off first?” he added as Alice turned with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. “I sha’n’t be long. You’ll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it’ll encourage me, you see.”
“Of course I’ll wait,” said Alice: “and thank you very much for coming so far—and for the song—I liked it very much.”
“I hope so,” the Knight said doubtfully: “but you didn’t cry so much as I thought you would.”
So they shook hands, and then the Knight rode slowly away into the forest. “It wo’n’t take long to see him off,
I expect,” Alice said to herself, as she stood watching him. “There he goes! Right on his head as usual! However, he gets on again pretty easily—that comes of having so many things hung round the horse—” So she went on talking to herself, as she watched the horse walking leisurely along the road, and the Knight tumbling off, first on one side and then on the other. After the fourth or fifth tumble he reached the turn, and then she waved her handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of sight.
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“I hope it encouraged him,” she said, as she turned to run down the hill: “and now for the last brook, and to be a Queen! How grand it sounds!” A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook.
22
“The Eighth Square at last!” she cried as she bounded across,
and threw herself down to rest on a lawn as soft as moss, with little flower-beds dotted about it here and there. “Oh, how glad I am to get here! And what is
this on my head?” she exclaimed in a tone of dismay, as she put her hands up to something very heavy, that fitted tight all round her head.
“But how can
it have got there without my knowing it?” she said to herself, as she lifted it off, and set it on her lap to make out what it could possibly be.
Although most Carrollians agree that Carroll intended the White Knight to represent himself, other candidates have been proposed. Don Quixote is an obvious choice, and the parallels are ably defended in John Hinz’s “Alice Meets the Don,” in the South Atlantic Quarterly
(Vol. 52, 1953, pages 253–66), reprinted in Aspects of Alice
(Vanguard, 1971), edited by Robert Phillips.
Charles Edwards wrote to tell me about a passage in Cervantes’s novel (Part 2, Chapter 4) in which the Don asks a poet to write an acrostic poem, the initial letters of its lines to spell “Dulcinea del Toboso.” The poet finds seventeen letters awkward for a poem with regular stanzas because seventeen is a prime number with no divisors. The Don advises him to work hard on it because “no woman will believe that those verses were made for her where her name is not plainly discerned.” “Alice Pleasance Liddell” has twenty-one letters. This made it possible for Carroll, in his acrostic terminal poem, to have seven stanzas of three lines each.
Another candidate for the White Knight is a chemist and inventor who was a friend of Carroll’s and is often mentioned in Carroll’s diary. See “The Chemist in Allegory: Augustus Vernon Harcourt and the White Knight,” by M. Christine King,
Journal of Chemical Education
(March 1983). Other candidates are considered in Chapter 7 of Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books.
Because Tenniel in later life had a handlebar mustache (and his nose resembled that of the White Knight), it has been suggested that Tenniel drew the Knight as a caricature of himself. This seems farfetched because at the time that he drew the White Knight he did not wear a mustache.
Tenniel’s frontispiece picture of the White Knight in many ways resembles Albrecht Dürer’s etching of the Knight in the presence of Death and the Devil. Was this intentional? When I wrote to Michael Hancher for his opinion, he called my attention to Tenniel’s cartoon in Punch
(March 5, 1887), titled “The Knight and His Companion (Suggested by Dürer’s famous picture).” The Knight represents Bismarck and his companion is Socialism. “Obviously Tenniel had a copy of the Dürer in front of him when he drew this cartoon,” Hancher wrote. “My hunch is that he did not when he drew the Looking-Glass
frontispiece, but that he called it up out of his remarkable visual memory.”
“The White Knight,” Carroll wrote to Tenniel, “must not have whiskers; he must not be made to look old.” Nowhere in the text does Carroll mention a mustache, nor does he indicate the knight’s age. Tenniel’s handlebar mustache and Newell’s bushy mustache were the artists’ additions. Perhaps Tenniel, sensing that the White Knight was Carroll, gave him a balding, elderly look to contrast his age with that of Alice.
Jeffrey Stern, in his article “Carroll Identifies Himself at Last” (Jabberwocky,
Summer/Autumn 1990), describes a game board hand-drawn by Carroll that was recently discovered. The nature of the game is unknown, but on the underside of the cardboard sheet Carroll had written “Olive Butler, from the White Knight. Nov. 21, 1892.” “So, at last,” Stern comments, “we know for certain that Carroll did
portray himself as the White Knight.”
DURER’S
KNIGHT
Carroll’s inventions include a chess set for travelers, with holes to hold pegged pieces; a cardboard grill (he called it a Nyctograph) to assist one in writing in the dark; a postage-stamp case with two “pictorial surprises” (see Chapter 6, Note 5, of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
). His diary contains such entries as: “The idea occurred to me that a game might be made of letters, to be moved about on a chess-board till they form words” (Dec. 19, 1880); “Concocted a new ‘Proportional Representation’ scheme, far the best I have yet devised. . . . Also invented rules for testing Divisibility of a number by 17 and by 19. An inventive day!” (June 3, 1884); “Invented a substitute for gum, for fastening envelopes . . . , mounting small things in books, etc.—viz: paper with gum on both
sides” (June 18, 1896); “Thought of a plan for simplifying money-orders, by making the sender fill up two duplicate papers, one of which he hands in to be transmitted by the postmaster—it contains a key-number, which the receiver has to supply in order to get the money. I think of suggesting this, and my plan for double postage on Sunday, to the Government” (Nov. 16, 1880).
Carroll’s rooms contained a variety of toys for the amusement of his child-guests: music boxes, dolls, windup animals (including a walking bear and one called “Bob the Bat,” which flew around the room), games, an “American orguinette” that played when you cranked a strip of punched paper through it. When he went on a journey, Stuart Collingwood tells us in his biography, “each separate article used to be carefully wrapped up in a piece of paper all to itself, so that his trunks contained nearly as much paper as of the more useful things.”
It is noteworthy also that, of all the characters Alice meets on her two dream adventures, only the White Knight seems to be genuinely fond of her and to offer her special assistance. He is almost alone in speaking to her with respect and courtesy, and we are told that Alice remembered him better than anyone else whom she met behind the mirror. His melancholy farewell may be Carroll’s farewell to Alice
when she grew up (became a queen) and abandoned him. At any rate, we hear loudest in this sunset episode that “shadow of a sigh” that Carroll tells us in his prefatory poem will “tremble through the story.”
The role of White Knight was taken by Gary Cooper in Paramount’s 1933 film, Alice in Wonderland.
—A. A. Milne, Year In, Year Out
(1952).
“The Knight is a sort of property master,” Lull summarizes, “whose furniture both recapitulates what has gone before and anticipates what will come.”
For more inventions by Carroll’s White Knight, see Chapter 9 of my Visitors from Oz.
A less technical but equally sound and delightful analysis of this passage is included in Roger W. Holmes’ article, “The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland”
(Antioch Review,
Summer 1959). Professor Holmes (he was chairman of the philosophy department at Mount Holyoke College) thinks that Carroll was pulling our leg when he has the White Knight say that the song is
“A-sitting on a Gate.” Clearly this cannot be the song itself, but only another name. “To be consistent,” Holmes concludes, “the White Knight, when he had said that the song is . . . ,
could only have burst into the song itself. Whether consistent or not, the White Knight is Lewis Carroll’s
cherished gift to logicians.”
The White Knight’s song also exhibits a kind of hierarchy, like a mirror reflection of a mirror reflection of an object. Carroll’s eccentric White Knight, whom Alice couldn’t forget, is also unable to forget another eccentric with traits that suggest that he too may be a caricature of Carroll; perhaps Carroll’s vision of himself as a lonely, unloved old man.
Upon the Lonely Moor
I met an aged, aged man
Upon the lonely moor:
I knew I was a gentleman,
And he was but a boor.
So I stopped and roughly questioned him,
“Come, tell me how you live!”
But his words impressed my ear no more
Than if it were a sieve.
He said, “I look for soap-bubbles,
That lie among the wheat,
And bake them into mutton-pies,
And sell them in the street.
I sell them unto men,” he said,
“Who sail on stormy seas;
And that’s the way I get my bread—
A trifle, if you please.”
But I was thinking of a way
To multiply by ten,
And always, in the answer, get
The question back again.
I did not hear a word he said,
But kicked that old man calm,
And said, “Come, tell me how you live!”
And pinched him in the arm.
His accents mild took up the tale:
He said, “I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
I set it in a blaze.
And thence they make a stuff they call
Rowland’s Macassar Oil;
But fourpence-halfpenny is all
They give me for my toil.”
But I was thinking of a plan
To paint one’s gaiters green,
So much the colour of the grass
That they could ne’er be seen.
I gave his ear a sudden box,
And questioned him again,
And tweaked his grey and reverend locks,
And put him into pain.
He said, “I hunt for haddocks’ eyes
Among the heather bright,
And work them into waistcoat-buttons
In the silent night.
And these I do not sell for gold,
Or coin of silver-mine,
But for a copper-halfpenny,
And that will purchase nine.
“I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
Or set limed twigs for crabs;
I sometimes search the flowery knolls
For wheels of hansom cabs.
And that’s the way” (he gave a wink)
“I get my living here,
And very gladly will I drink
Your Honour’s health in beer.”
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine.
I duly thanked him, ere I went,
For all his stories queer,
But chiefly for his kind intent
To drink my health in beer.
And now if e’er by chance I put
My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe;
Or if a statement I aver
Of which I am not sure,
I think of that strange wanderer
Upon the lonely moor.
“Upon the Lonely Moor” was written for Tennyson’s son Lionel. Here is Carroll’s account of its origin, from an April 1862 entry in his diary. The entry was in a portion of the diary now missing, but Stuart Collingwood quotes it in his biography of Carroll.
After luncheon I went to the Tennysons, and got Hallam and Lionel to sign their names in my album. Also I made a bargain with Lionel, that he was to give me some MS. of his verses, and I was to send him some of mine. It was a very difficult bargain to make; I almost despaired of it at first, he put in so many conditions—first, I was to play a game of chess with him; this, with much difficulty we reduced to twelve moves on each side; but this made little difference, as I checkmated him at the sixth move. Second, he was to be allowed to give me one blow on the head with a mallet (this he at last consented to give up). I forget if there were others, but it ended in my getting the verses, for which I have written out “The Lonely Moor” for him.
“ ‘Sitting on a Gate’ is
a parody,” Carroll said in a letter (see The Letters of Lewis Carroll,
edited by Morton Cohen, Vol. 1, page 177), “though not as to style or metre—but its plot is borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence,’ a poem that has always amused me a good deal (though it is by no means a comic poem) by the absurd way in which the poet goes on questioning the poor old leech-gatherer, making him tell his history over and over again, and never attending to what he says. Wordsworth ends with a moral—an example I have not
followed.”
Carroll surely identified himself with the song’s “aged aged man,” a man even further removed in age from Alice than was the White Knight. In “Isa’s Visit to Oxford,” Carroll calls himself “the Aged Aged Man,” abbreviating it throughout the diary as “the A.A.M.” Carroll was then fifty-eight. He often referred to himself in letters to child-friends as an aged, aged man.
On the whole, Wordsworth’s poem is a fine poem, and I say this with awareness of the fact that a portion of it is included in
The Stuffed Owl,
that hilarious anthology of bad verse compiled by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee.
The opening lines of the White Knight’s song burlesque Wordsworth’s lines “I’ll tell you everything I know” and “I’ll give you all the help I can” from the original version of one of the poet’s less happy efforts called “The Thorn.” The line also reflects the title of the song, “I give thee all, I can no more,” to the tune of which the White Knight sings about the aged aged man. This song is Thomas Moore’s lyric, “My Heart and Lute,” which was set to music by the English composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop. Carroll’s song follows the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of Moore’s poem.
“The character of the White Knight,” Carroll wrote in a letter, “was meant to suit the speaker in the poem.” That the speaker is Carroll himself is suggested by his thoughts on multiplying by ten in the third stanza of the earlier version. It is quite possible that Carroll regarded Moore’s love lyric as the song that he, the White Knight, would have liked to sing to Alice but dared not. The full text of Moore’s poem follows.
