KITTY: A really strong analysis that with one revision will be obvious. Make sure to refer to the speaker of the poem vs. Carroll. For revision, check the main ideas of each paragraph. Make sure this main idea can be summed up as an analysis of a specific part or element of the poem. Support claims with specific analysis of individual words or literary elements (imagery, metaphor, etc.). Weeding out the generalizations will leave strong analysis of the words on the page.

Kitty Schwan

Mr Jennings

2nd hr Hon Eng 3

January 17, 2013

Lewis Carroll’s “A Boat Beneath A Sunny Sky”

Lewis Carroll is more known for his works Alice in Wonderland C—UNDERLINE OR ITALICIZE BOOK TITLES and Through the Looking Glass but his talent still shines through in other mediums of literature. “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky”, a relatively short 7 stanza poem, continues his popular theme of dreams through his famous Alice character. The poem is an acrostic poem, reading down “Alice Pleasance Liddel”, the name of the real girl that inspired the character of her namesake. Lewis Carroll’s relationship with the young Alice is still a controversial one until this day.--RELEVANCE TO YOUR ANALYSIS OF THE POEM?

The poem originally was given no name, it was just place at the end of his novel Through The Looking Glass but it has become known by the first line of the poem “A Boat Beneath A Sunny Sky”. With just that line Carroll is able to set the mystic, dreamy tone. “Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July” provokes the image of the boat ominously WHY OMINOUS? floating but his words like “sunny” and “dreamily” gives the feeling of a happy nostalgia. July, being a summer month, is usually associated with good memories which further plays into the nostalgia.

“Children three that nestle near, eager eye and willing ear, pleased a simple tale to hear”, again Carroll astounds with his ability at producing vivid imagery in a simple sentence fragment. You see three children gathered around him, enthralled by his tales of Alice and her adventures in her dreamland.--HOW DO WE KNOW IT’S THIS STORY? None of the words (willing ear, simple, nestle, etc.) seem to have the dreamy quality to them as the words did in the last stanza because this is not the story he is telling to the children, but rather the story he is telling to the readers about the story to the children.

“Long has paled that sunny sky” continues the nostalgic attitude by invoking the feeling that something good (the “sunny sky”) is being left behind or has taken a turn for the worse by it paling. The next two lines continue to elaborate on his reminiscence of the event with loaded words like “die”, “fade”, and “slain July”GREAT HEREHERE MAKE SURE IF YOU INTRODUCE A LITERARY ELEMENT YOU EXPLAIN HOW IT ADDS TO THE POEMwhile still keeping up the rhyming scheme of every line of each stanza rhyming that carries through the entire poem.

CarrollREPLACE W/ SPEAKER continues to recall the adventures, even though time has moved on he has not which is apparent in the line “Still she haunts me, phantomwise” Phantomwise, even though its a word made up by Lewis Carroll, still gets the point across of something being ghost-like memory while playing into the mystic tone. “Alice moving under skies, never seen by waking eyes” is, unless you know the story of Alice in Wonderland, the first indication of the tale being a dream and the first mention of Alice at all. “Never seen by waking eyes” gives the stanza an uncanny feel and continues with the spooky ghost-like comparison.

The second stanza is repeated, pulling the reader back into real life and reiterating the children absorbed in the telling of the wonderland. The continuation of the rhyme scheme aides in giving the poem the magical feel by having simple rhymes with an almost lyric quality. This dulls down the occasional eerie tone and makes the poem more light-hearted and whimsical without losing the ever-present dreaminess.--EXPAND THIS PARAGRAPH OR INCORPORATE INTO OTHERS. THIS FEELS LIKE YOU PAUSED TO TAKE A BREATH AND SUM UP WHAT YOU WERE THINKING RATHER THAN ANALYSIS.

The poem continues “In Wonderland they lie,”, when he uses the pronoun “they” you can assume that he is no longer telling the story, but rather describing the children in a wonderland of their own listening to his story. Carroll’s parallelism in line 17 and 18, “dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die” continues to emphasize the idea of never leaving wonderland, or never stopping dreaming, that he presented earlier in stanza 3.

The last stanza has similar wording to the first and evokes roughly the same image of a boat haphazardly floating down the stream without even mentioning the boat again. It is clear that now it is the children on the ‘boat’ rather than Alice now from the colon in stanza 6, leaving the last stanza a continuation from the one preceding. The tone has shifted away from the sad nostalgia with phrases like “golden gleam” and without the reminiscent ties it had before. The poem ends with a question, “Life, what is it but a dream?”. The fact that is it a question at all stands out from the rest of the poem just with sentence structure. Dreams were the main object of thought throughout the entire poem and now Carroll finishes by saying that life is really just a dream. Carroll suggests that a dream can be more than just a dream, if you consider it real life then it is. This calls to mind a quote by W. I. Thomas “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” which is basically a less poetic way of saying the exact same thing Carroll did.