Charles Dodgson was a logical and analytical thinker, a man who enjoyed finding and applying patterns both in his career and in his writings under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. An example of this trend is the way Carroll wrote poems in Alice in Wonderland. Based on real poems, carefully used poems often have grossly different meanings an important role. Carroll chose didactic poems to transform the story; he mocks the inner Victorian morality and creates his own code of conduct in Alice in Wonderland comments on Victorian beliefs by changing Alice as a character and defining Lewis Carroll as a writer . Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In his edited poem based on Isaac Watts', Carroll makes Alice seem predatory and aggressive. . The original poem, “Against Idleness and Evil,” illustrates a bee buzzing around gathering honey to improve its hive. The poem was intended to teach children the value of hard work using phrases such as “the busy bee / improves every shining hour” and “why Satan still finds some harm / for idle hands to do” (Carroll 16). The bee analogy makes the moralistic poem fun and easy for young children to remember. This poem expresses values ​​believed to be vital to Victorian children. Hard work, diligence and religion, all the themes addressed by the original work are strong moral principles that are warped and distorted by Carroll in "How Doth the Little Crocodile". The highly moral poem turns into a shorter version with a daunting crocodile waiting to devour the fish (Carroll 16). His “golden scales” and “sweetly smiling jaws” are present in the average children's story (Carroll 16). Instead of constructing an obviously dark poem, Carroll uses light and jovial language to paint an ominous picture. Alice is a little scared by the scene created by the poem she recites. Alice from Wonderland scares the real Alice; Carroll introduces this connection in the opening of the story and develops the relationship until the real Alice merges with Alice in Wonderland. Carroll continues to question Alice's intelligence through the Caterpillar, creating yet another opportunity to criticize English society. Wanting to test Alice's aptitudes, he asks the young woman to recite "The comforts of the old man and how he obtained them". Alice begins the poem in a similar way, but instead of shouting, “You are old, Father William,” the young man says it in Alice's version; a minor detail that changes the context of future lines (Carroll 35-36). Robert Southey's young man was respectful and interested in the “Comforts of the Old Man” while the young man in Alice's oration was doubtful and slightly annoyed with the old man. Furthermore, the man in the new poem performs more particular actions than the original man. Rather than “a vigorous old man,” Carroll's work describes him as fat (35). The old man stands on his head, eats whole birds, and balances eels on his face, these strange tendencies add to the nonsense of Wonderland, but also reflect Alice's feelings towards old people (Carroll 36-39). Carroll mocks Victorian views of children when he rewrites "Speak Gently" to create "Speak Roughly". The first, by GW Langford, is the original poem and a thoroughly moralistic piece. It achieves the good-natured value of treating needy people courteously. Acting politely towards the sick, the homeless, the elderly and the wandering is a present principlein the ideal Victorian society. Carroll reverses the message of the poem through the Duchess. Singing to her baby pig, the woman encourages people to "talk rudely to your baby" and "hit him when he sneezes." (Carroll 46) The Duchess seeks the moral of everything and preaches from the saying, “Take care of the senses and the sound will take care of itself.” (Carroll 69) This saying comes from an English proverb: “Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.” This teaches the value of small things and Robert Phillips suggests that the Duchess distorts the meaning to give impractical advice (121). If you “take care of the meaning”, decide what you will think, if you do this before listening to the real situation, you risk losing the true meaning of what was said (Carroll 69). Placed in the context of the story's kitchen, the moralistic duchess says she hits the boy as an involuntary reaction to the excess of pepper around him. According to Nina Auerbach this has to do with Carroll's thoughts on boys; he saw them as scary and dirty (31). Carroll's view also sees little girls as perfect, supporting Victorian ideas (Auerbach 32). The inclusion of the choir in his edition similarly changes the context of the situation. Instead of a narrator, in this case the Duchess, expressing her opinion, gets a group of people to agree with the extravagant caretaker. When the chorus says “Wow! Oh! Wow!”, isolates Alice and the reader from opposing the boy's abusive treatment (Carroll 46). With this inverse of the Victorian ideal, Carroll provides a rationale for how all creatures have treated Alice throughout the story. When she first entered Wonderland, Alice was truly a little girl unsure of herself. When the inhabitants of Wonderland approached her, they saw the little girl as small and insecure and treated her accordingly. As the plot progressed, however, the little girl herself became a powerful and authoritative figure that the creatures saw as a threat. The difference between the two poems is related to and reason for the change in treatment of Alice in the novel. Carroll did not always reinvent poems to influence the overall plot, in some cases; he simply uses them to add more nonsense by including a personal event. At the tea party, the Hatter performs a short parody of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” called “The Bat.” This jovial piece is actually a reference to one of Oxford's senior professors. Bartholomew Price, nicknamed “the Bat,” was one of Carroll's instructors and a friend of the Liddell family. According to a passage in The Annotated Alice, the poem is an allusion to a funny story involving Price (Carroll & Tenniel 136). The don created a playroom for the small children who often came to visit him; this room included a homemade flying bat (Phillips 98). One day, the bat ended up flying out of a window and landing on a tea tray. The young man carrying it became frightened and threw the plate, resulting in the fourth line of the poem being “like a tea tray in the sky” (Carroll, 55) (Phillips, 98). Although the anecdote is mostly a joke to those who knew the story, "The Bat", further confuses Alice at the Tea Party. Derived from Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly", Carroll displays his literary prowess while at the same time playing with Victorian ideals about children and mirroring the meter perfectly in his version. The amount of thought applied to preserve this underlying feature of the poem shows Carroll's literary skill and dedication. The original form of the poem describes a spider inviting a fly into its home. The fly eventually outwits the cunning spider and shows the children tobe careful of strangers. In his adaptation, "The Lobster's Quadrille", Carroll uses a similar situation, but with an altered ending. A whiting tries to convince a snail to join him in a dance in which lobsters toss them into the sea (Carroll 77). The fish seems to have no ulterior motives and simply wants the snail to join in the ritual dance, but the snail is afraid to participate because of how slow it is and how far they will throw it into the sea. The whiting skillfully uses logic to reassure the snail when he says, "The farther from England, the closer to France" (Carroll 78). This not only increases the wit and crassness of the story, but is also the only time the setting is stated exclusively (Carroll 78). This seemingly innocuous addition shows that Carroll's story is not as isolated from reality as many think. It reminds the reader that Alice is just a rabbit hole away from where her journey began. In the same scene as “The Lobster Quadrille,” Carroll uses another poem, “The Lobster,” to portray a serious and valuable moral to readers. “The Sluggard” by Isaac Watts is a didactic poem that teaches the value of thought and hard work. It describes a wanderer who refuses to wake up and establish himself in something useful. The poem is overly condescending and ends with a lesson as most moralistic poems do. Carroll's peculiar interpretation of the poem presents a boastful lobster. The extremely vain crustacean speaks as if he were invincible (Carroll 80). However, when the tide rises and sharks surround him, the cheeky lobster cowers in fear (Carroll 80). The new poem conveys an equally important moral in a very different way. Rather than teaching children to work hard, Carroll shows the importance of humility and character; Don't act like you're someone, you're not. The next time Carroll parodies a poem; he does not impart a moral, but rather creates a comic rewrite of a popular song of his time. The original is a sentimental and serious ode to the “star of the evening”. The new version, starring Mock Turtle, is serious, but full of inane content. The “evening soup” is irresistible, better than any other course, and is, by all accounts, “beau - ootiful” (Carroll 82). This song does little for the overall plot, but changes Alice's situation in retrospect. When Alice first met the Griffin and the Mock Turtle, she and the reader felt a connection between them; they were the most normal characters in the story so far. After listening to Lobster Quadrille, and especially after “Soup of the Evening,” there is an apparent darkness about all the characters in Wonderland (Carroll 78 & 82-83). The final rewrite comes in the form of an unsigned note submitted to the proof. The note that Alice “[does] not believe there is an atom of meaning in,” is similar to William Mee's “Alice Gray” (Carroll 93). The poet's situation is clearly analogous to Carroll's with Alice. He loves being with Alice, but he knows he will grow up. By the time the novellas were published, she was already becoming distant and did not share his feelings. Despite this poem of less than coincidental origin, Carroll's version of the poem speaks to the process on a surface level. Even though the letter is crucial evidence, Alice sees it as nonsense. Carroll uses truly nonsensical poetry to grow Alice's understanding of her surroundings. Through the poem, he understands that there is nothing to understand and that the pattern of Wonderland was random. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Using several methods, Lewis Carroll does.