Today’s Poem of the Day provides an odd closure to a well-known but strange novel, the 1871 “Through the Looking Glass,” by Lewis Carroll (1832–1898). We’re accustomed to Carroll (whose real identity was an Oxford mathematician, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) as a writer who regarded language as a place to play. Two of his parodies have run previously as the Sun’s Poem of the Day: “How Doth the Little Crocodile,” which mocks the moralizing verse of Isaac Watts, and “Atalanta in Camden-Town,” which rather convolutedly makes fun of Algernon Charles Swinburne. 

“Through the Looking Glass,” the sequel to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” features again a young heroine named for the daughter of a friend, in another series of adventures in a strange country. Though as madcap and jokey as the first novel — it includes, for example, the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” among other now-famous verses — “Through the Looking Glass” taps into a subterranean stream of sadness.

In one chapter, for instance, Alice is walking with a fawn through a “wood where things have no names.” Beneath the amnesiac trees, she and the fawn converse as intimate friends, Alice’s arm around the fawn’s neck — until they emerge and remember, and the fawn flees in terror from the human child. It’s a heartbreaking moment, a striking scene amid all the puzzles and puns and general surreality of the Looking-Glass land. The loss of innocence, the return of recognition and fear in one blow, prefigures the poem with which the book ends.

That poem is “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” today’s Poem of the Day. It seems out of character for Carroll, too straightforwardly elegiac to be the work of our familiar master of nonsense. Its rhymed tetrameter tercets recall the scene of his first telling the story of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to the real-life Alice Liddell and her sisters.

And of course the river is both a real river, remembered from that enchanted day, and time, which bears all things away, until life itself seems nothing but a fantasy recalled. Yet even in this poem where his jokester’s mask seems to drop, Carroll continues his puzzle-play. The whole poem, in its poignancy, is an acrostic, spelling out Alice’s full name: ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL. 

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky
by Lewis Carroll

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?

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.