“The
Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And
then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And
all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.
"‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of
shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And
why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.’"—English
children’s book author, poet, mathematician, and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis
Carroll (1832-1898), “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” in Through the
Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
By
now, you’d think I’d know better than to listen to sports radio. I keep tuning,
for instance, to my local version of the form, WFAN-FM, hoping for news or
insights into my favorite sports teams—the Yankees, the Knicks, the Giants.
But
as often as not I have to put up with idiotic ravings that fill up the airspace
featuring the hosts’ hobbies, family lives, or, God help me, political
leanings.
Even
so, I was a little surprised the other day when, on WFAN’s afternoon show, Craig
Carton and on-air partner Chris McMonigle, in a not particularly inspired bit
of free association, came up with “the carpenter and the walrus.”
These
two figures, the pair thought, were from a “fable.” If that was the case,
Carton believed, maybe it was from Aesop’s Fables, as he was “an Aesop
man.”
By
now, their producers perhaps have told them this is not the case. Not that this
would matter, because next week the pair could come up with an equally wrongheaded
misattribution and make their schoolteachers roll over in their graves.
Even
so, maybe someone can tell them that the Walrus and the Carpenter don’t appear
in a fable but in a narrative poem enclosed in the fantasy novel Through the
Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland? Better yet, could someone please send them a copy of these
verses?
By
the way, the image accompanying this post, of the Walrus and the Carpenters
speaking to the oysters, was created by English illustrator Sir John Tenniel
(1820-1914) for the original edition of Through the Looking-Glass.
