In Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, the easiest place to start is not so much the beginning, nor with structure or sound, but with the story, which is basic enough. In it, we follow a nameless youth who, after receiving warning about several dangerous animals from his father, goes out to do battle with one of them, the Jabberwock itself. After an unsuccessful search, our hero pauses for a rest and to think, and it is while thinking that he is attacked by the very beast he is seeking. The youth beheads the Jabberwock after an intense battle and returns triumphantly home, to the accolades of his father. The tale is simple enough, and can be thought of as a coming-of-age story. However, what makes Carroll’s poem so enduring is not the tale it tells, but the combination of nonsense words, the lyrical sounds and shifting, deceptive structure it uses to tell it.

Many of the words used in the poem are obscure, and often they are completely fabricated. The first stanza, which is repeated at the end, is the biggest offender. Fortunately, Humpty Dumpty defines all of the unusual words of this stanza for us in chapter 6 of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This is indeed fortunate because of them, only "gyre" (2) can be found in the dictionary, where it is defined as "to move in a circle or spiral", which is close enough to Humpty’s definition of "to go round and round like a gyroscope" (Alice, Carroll). For all the others, we are forced to accept the egg-like man’s interpretations at face value, no matter how doubtful we may be of someone who pays his words every Saturday night (Alice, Carroll).

In the rest of the poem, the concocted words are usually either the names of specific types of plants and animals, such as the Bandersnatch, (8) the Tumtum tree, (11) and of course, the Jabberwock itself, (5, 14, and 21) or used as adjectives. One may usually gather from their usage general positive or negative connotations, but little more than that. In other cases, actual dictionary-definable words are being used, but in such a way that it’s easy to dismiss them if a reader is careless.

"Whiffle", (15) for example, means "to blow unsteadily or in gusts", and is usually something the wind does, although apparently Jabberwocks do it is well. They also "burble" (16), which means to babble or prattle. "Galumphing" (20) is not a portmanteau of "triumphant" and "galloping", as one might expect, but actually refers to moving with a kind of clumsy, heavy tread. "Beamish" (22) means "beaming or bright with optimism, promise, or achievement", and to "chortle" (24) is "to sing or chant exultantly."

Now, "snicker-snack" (18) is an interesting case. Although "snicker-snack" does not appear in the dictionary, it contains the word "snick", which has an archaic mean "to cut through", and sounds similar to the word "snickersnee", which is a large knife, and "snick or snee," which once meant "to engage in cut and thrust fighting." This appears to be very close to what the subject of the poem is actually doing at this point.

As for the other words in the poem, if you can’t recognize them immediately, it’s because they aren’t real words, just collections of letters that look and sound like they should be words. They are, in fact, jabberwocky, a word that itself had no meaning before Carroll used it as the title of his poem, but is now defined in dictionaries as "meaningless speech or writing."

As for sound, "Jabberwocky" is a poem that sounds very musical when read aloud, although it is constantly changing its tune. In the beginning, heavy use of "m" and "g" sounds give the first stanza a quiet feel, while the repeated use of the letters "s" and "th" results in a sort of "hissing" effect. The overall effect is to give the impression of a sort of snake-like slithering. It is, in fact, a slithy stanza. From there we move into father’s warning, where frequent "j", "b", and "s" sounds keep things somewhat quiet, but where the use of the hard "c" and "tch" sound combines with the repeated word "Beware" (5 and 7) to add a harsh, discordant effect. The third stanza gets louder, and line 11 seems picks up a more definite beat then we’ve seen before. That line seems to plod steadily with its heavy use of the hard "t" sound, perhaps like the search that the poem’s subject is now resting from. The next stanza quiets a bit, and is not so heavily dominated by any one sound as it instead sets the listener up for the climatic battle in the next stanza. "One, two! One, two! And through and through" (17) practically demands to be shouted, and the galloping pace continues through end with our hero’s triumphant return home. The sixth stanza is a celebration, "Callooh, Callay!" (23) We have one final shout out before quieting down again in the final stanza, a slithy repeat of the first four lines.

We have saved for last what usually comes first, the discussion of general structure. This is because structure is quite one of the most complex things about "Jabberwocky", and if we were to try and chase it around at the start we’d have been left too breathless to go over any of the other details. Still, there are a few things that can be said with certainty. There are certainly seven stanzas of four lines each, and the last stanza is certainly a repeat of the first one. Within each stanza, the second line certainly always rhymes with the fourth. Usually, the first three lines of a stanza will have eight syllables, while the fourth line has only six. There is only one exception to this rule, and that is the third line of the third stanza, which has nine syllables. This is interesting, as three by three equals nine, but it may also be co-incidence. Whether or not it is so is beyond my ability to fathom. Most often, the first and third lines rhyme, but this is a "rule" that only applies a little over half the time. Line 11 (the nine-syllable line) and line 23 (sixth stanza) go with internal rhymes, leaving their partners out in the cold, and in the battle stanza lines 17 and 19 both use internal rhymes. The thing about "Jabberwocky" is, at an initial glance-through it seems to have a consistent structure and rhyme scheme, all sense flees upon closer examination.

And this is the ultimate truth behind every aspect of the poem itself. The rhyme scheme seems consistent, and looks like it ought to be consistent, but isn’t. The structure seems to be recognizable, and looks like it ought to recognizable, but it isn’t. The words seem like they make sense, and look like they ought to make sense, but they don’t. The story itself seems to have meaning, and looks like it ought to have meaning, but the meaning is fleeting. In the end, it’s all stuff and nonsense. In the end, it’s all jabberwocky.