A boat, beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—

Lingering in the golden gleam—

Life, what is it but a dream? 1

1. In this terminal poem, one of Carroll’s best, he recalls that July 4 boating expedition up the Thames on which he first told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the three Liddell girls. The poem echoes the themes of winter and death that run through the prefatory poem of Through the Looking-Glass. It is the song of the White Knight, remembering Alice as she was before she turned away, with tearless and eager eyes, to run down the hill and leap the last brook into womanhood. The poem is an acrostic, the initial letters of the lines spelling Alice’s full name.

Matthew Hodgart wrote from England to suggest that in this stanza of his acrostic poem Carroll was consciously echoing the sentiments of that anonymous canon, well known in England at the time:

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream;

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream.

Ralph Lutts, a correspondent who makes the same suggestion, points out that “merrily” in the canon links to the “merry crew” in the prefatory poem of the first Alice book.

The real world and the “eerie” state of dreaming alternate throughout Carroll’s two Sylvie and Bruno books. “Either I’ve been dreaming about Sylvie,” he says to himself in Chapter 2 of the first book, “and this is reality. Or else I’ve been with Sylvie, and this is the dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?”

The prefatory poem of Sylvie and Bruno, an acrostic on the name of Isa Bowman, conveys the same theme:

Is all our Life, then, but a dream

Seen faintly in the golden gleam

Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,

Or laughing at some raree-show,

We flutter idly to and fro.

Man’s little Day in haste we spend,

And, from its merry noontide, send

No glance to meet the silent end.

Morris Glazer wonders in a letter if Carroll intended “Alice” to begin the poem’s middle line, thus putting her at the center of the poem as she was central in his life.