It’s been fun going Through the Looking Glass with the Mythgard Academy. In my own (frequent) readings, I tend to focus on the mathematical jokes1, so the way Corey Olsen takes apart the verses is new to me.

I love the idea that the mirror is playing a substantial role. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are characters in a poem in our world. It’s in trochaic meter, with lines of four feet and three feet alternating. The poem they recite to Alice, which necessarily comes from their world, is in iambic meter, with lines of four feet and three feet.2 They’re mirror images!

Also, the way cause and effect get reversed is fun. The White Queen can remember either way through time, and Prof. Olsen makes the excellent point that when Alice thinks of a nursery rhyme from the primary world, and then the events happen to the characters around her, that’s the same phenomenon. She can remember things that haven’t happened yet.

Tenniel's illustration of the Lion and the UnicornReversal of poetic meter also happens, though less perfectly, in “The Lion and the Unicorn”. Suppose we use “+” to indicate a stressed syllable and “-” to indicate unstressed.3 The pattern of stresses in “The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown” is “-+-⁠-⁠-+-⁠-⁠-+-⁠-⁠-+” which my ear splits up into (-+-⁠-)(-+-⁠-)(-+-⁠-)(-+). That is to say, I hear it as a four-syllable foot. Now, I know that real scholars think the rhythm of the end of the line is important and the beginning is not, but that’s not how I hear things. I hear the rhythm established at the beginning as dominant. A change in rhythm within a line sounds like it’s at the end. 4

In the second line of “L&U”, Prof. Olsen talked quite a bit about the “all ’round the town”. One of the students asked why the first syllable was missing from “around”, which with the would have made it a nice alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. But that’s not what this poem is about. This poem is about four-syllable feet. All ’round the town is “++-+”, which is what we get for the rest of the verse, like “Some gave them brown.” This latter foot is related to the first foot “-+-⁠-” by a mathematical transformation: exchange stressed syllables for unstressed, and reverse the order in time.

But wait a minute — there’s a symmetry of nature called CPT Symmetry that says if you exchange positive charges for negative (Charge), flip a system in a mirror (Parity), and reverse the flow of time (Time), all the laws of physics are the same. We’ve done all three here, so the plum-cake should act the same as it does in our world. At least, I hope we have done all three — if she’s just flipped Time and Parity, Alice has entered a world of antimatter and boom! the book would be much shorter. Slicing a plum-cake after it’s handed round is un-physical.

Now, we might be tempted to excuse Lewis Carroll on the grounds that quantum field theory wouldn’t be invented for half a century after the publication of Through the Looking Glass, but your humble Idiosopher respectfully submits that an author so skilled at time reversal should have remembered it.

 

Notes

  1. Bilban, Tina. “Alice’s Adventures in Scienceland.” Libri et liberi: časopis za istraživanje dječje književnosti i kulture 4.2 (2015): 313-340
  2. Another great thing about Mythgard is that this has been designated “hobbit meter”.
  3. In a post a few years ago I tried to use the proper symbols, but they didn’t render properly in some browsers. Even pluses and minuses weren’t easy.
  4. Both my parents are musicians, which may account for it.