An Analysis Of Alice's Adventure In Wonderland

Along with his love for playing-on-words in the story, Carroll also provided an original poem that he wrote at the beginning of the novel before the first chapter that serves as an epigraph for the book, suggesting the story’s theme and origin. The poem opens with a description of the sunny, summer day in 1862 when Carroll and his Oxford friend Liddell’s three daughters went out on a boat trip on the river together, where the story of Alice all started. During the outing, the girls—addressed in the epigraph as Prima, Secunda, and Tertia—beg Carroll to tell them a story, as he often did when he was with them. He claims that he is too tired on account of the rowing and the “dreamy weather,” (stanza 2, line 2), but he gives in as he finds himself

He manages to get through the entire story, and the group happily returns home at the end of the day. The last stanza ends the poem by opening the beginning of the story of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland by alluding to its childish and dreamlike theme. Carroll composed this poem as an epigraph for the novel in order to maintain the personal feeling of telling the story to the Liddell girls out loud.
The epigraph serves as an allusion to the whole Wonderland story itself, but Carroll also offers other allusions to other literary works, such as poems and nursery rhymes, within the novel through parodied lyrics. One example is the poem by Isaac Watts, How Doth the Little Busy Bee, but instead of Alice reciting the poem correctly as “[h]ow doth the little busy bee, [i]mprove each shining hour, [a]nd gather honey all the day, [f]rom every opening flower,” (stanza 1), she recites it as “[h]ow doth the little crocodile, [i]mprove his shining tail, [a]nd pour the waters of the Nile, [o]n every golden scale,” (Wonderland 2.8). Another example is Robert Southey’s Old Man’s Comforts, with the