First Loves: From "Jabberwocky" to "After Apple-Picking"

There are two types of influences in the life of a writer: those influences that come so early in childhood, they seem to soak into the very marrow of our bones and to condition our interpretation of the universe thereafter; and those that come a little later, when we can exercise more control of our environment and our response to it, and have begun to be aware of the strategies of art.

My discovery of poetry-or of-verse-came when I was very young. In 1946, for my eighth birthday, my grandmother gave me a beautiful illustrated copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. This book with its handsome cloth cover embossed with bizarre creatures, and the astonished Alice in their midst, was the great treasure of my childhood. This was love at first sight. (I may have fallen in love with the very concept of Book, too.) Like Alice, I plummeted headfirst down the rabbit hole and/or climbed boldly through the mirror into the looking-glass world and, in a manner of speaking, never entirely returned to real life. My heroine was this strangely assured, courageous young girl of about my age I would not have guessed was of another culture and distinctly of another economic class; I most admired her for her curiosity (which mirrored my own) and for the equanimity with which she confronted dream- and nightmare situations (as I could never have done). Within a few months I'd memorized much of both Alice books, and could recite, for anyone willing to listen, nearly all the poems.

The first Wonderland poem, which must be the first poem of my life, looks, strangely, to a contemporary adult eye, like experimental verse by (pos. sibly) e. e. cummings or William Carlos Williams. This curiosity, which fascinated me as a child and inspired me to much imitation, is meant to replicate a mouse's long tail, dwindling down the page until its final, mordant words are set in miniature type, hardly readable. In Lewis Carroll's children's classic there is much seemingly incongruous concern with dying and death and being eaten; Wonderland is also concerned with justice, not ordinarily a concept one associates with children. But here is a seemingly playful poem that suggests the cruelty and injustice of the world as perceived by the mouse (child?) victim, helpless at the hands (or jaws) of the oppressor. The poem dramatizes a cat named Fury in his confrontation with an anonymous mouse/victim: "Fury said to/ a mouse, That/ he met/ in the/ house. . . " and ends with the cryptic words, "'and/ condemn/ you/ to/ death."' Children's literature, especially in the past, didn't shrink from depictions of cruelty and sadism; Lewis Carroll, in whom the child-self abided through his celibate lifetime, understood instinctively the child's propensity to laugh at the very things that arouse anxiety, like outrageous injustice, sudden death, disappearing, being devoured. Most of the celebrated Alice poems seem whimsical unless you examine them more closely. Many depict abrupt outbursts of temper or reversals of fortune so swift they appear comic: "Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs"; "Speak roughly to your little boy,/ And beat him when he sneezes;/ He only does it to annoy,/ Because he knows it teases." The more blatant the rime the more it appeals to childish ear; one reason why blatant rimes offend us when we're adults and seemingly in need of more subtlety and modulation in the music of poetry.

But it was the sharply rimes and accented "Jabberwocky" that made the most profound impression on me. For young children, whose brains are struggling to comprehend language, words are magical in any case; the magic of adults, utterly mysterious; no child can distinguish between "real" words and nonsensical or "unreal" words, and verse like Lewis Carroll's brilliant "Jabberwocky" has the effect of both arousing childish anxiety (what do these terrifying words mean?) and placating it (don't worry: you can decode the meaning by the context). In The Annotated Alice, by Martin Gardner, footnotes for "Jabberwocky" cover several pages in small type; it's considered the greatest nonsense poem in English. I was fascinated -by the bizarre, secret language and by the poem's dreamlike violent action, depicted in the most hideous of John Tenniel's drawings, of a grotesque winged monster with a tail like a python and gigantic claws, confronted by a very small boy with a sword. I must have liked it, thoughtful child that I was, to be told that, "vorpal sword in hand," the young hero rested "by the Tumtum tree,/ And stood awhile in thought." The entire poem is irremediably imprinted in my memory, who knows why? it's a fantasy of a child's successful defense against the (adult) unknown, perhaps. It's a parody of heroic adventure tales. But I think, for me, it was the language that most fascinated: "One, two! One, two!/ And through and through/ The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!/ He left it dead, and with its head/ He went galumphing back."

How has Lewis Carroll's verse influenced my poetry? Has there been any direct influence at all? It may be that the Alice books have more influenced my philosophical/ metaphysical perspective on life than my poetry. At the periphery of many of my poems and works of fiction, as in the corner of an eye, there is often an element of the grotesque or surreal. As a child as young as eight I may have been imbued with an indelible sense of playfulness and morbidity, in about equal measure. But isn't this, Lewis Carroll would inquire pleasantly, simply the way the world is?

Those poets I read, and reread, in high school, college and in my early twenties have had a more obvious influence on my writing, of course. of these, unquestionably, perhaps inevitably, Robert Frost was my first poet. Frost's influence is so pervasive in American poetry, like Whitman's, as to be beyond assessment. Like the verse of Lewis Carroll, the poetry of Frost has entered my soul. Frost's deceptively plain language, the subtle rhythm of his poetry, his beauty of phrasing, his irony and stoic resolve, are never in stronger evidence than in my favorite Frost poem, "After Apple- Picking," which I read first in high school at about the age of fifteen. This poem of surpassing beauty and melancholy had a particular significance for me since I did pick apples, pears, and cherries in my family's fruit orchard, standing on a ladder, though I was never allowed to climb as high as my father on his "long two-pointed ladder." I understood from experience how the poet's "instep arch not only keeps the ache,/ It keeps the pressure of a ladderround." Frost allowed young writers like me to see that the experiences of our domestic, seemingly ordinary lives could be transmuted into worthy art; not Shakespeare's exalted kings and queens and nobility, in poetry so refined and intricate it seemed, to young readers, another language entirely, were his subjects, but men, women, children like ourselves. This is a distinctly American poetry, accessible to all. It isn't the content of what we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression of this content that determines the worth of our effort.

"After Apple-Picking" was, and is, a hypnotic, haunting poem. Though I was a teenager when I first read it, I must have sympathized with its sombre, reflective lines, which are those of a much older person (a poet?) looking back upon his life with mingled pride and regret.* The inevitability of loss is the poem's powerful subtext. I think I came closest to understanding Frost best in the lines "For I have had too much/ Of apple-picking: I am overtired/ Of the great harvest I myself desired." The poem is, in its understated way, a tragic work of art. Yet there's a defiant human resilience beneath. It's a poem that can read by anyone, and yet it's a poet's poem. Its influence has surely been considerable in my life.

*In fact, Frost was Only 39 when he wrote this poem, while living in England and, as Jay Parini suggests in his new, excellent Robert Frost: A Life, stimulated to write of New England partly out of homesickness. "After Apple Picking," "Mending Wall," and "Birches" are all of this period, included in Frost's second book North of Boston (194).

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author, most recently, of The Collector of Hearts (stories), Broke Heart Blues (novel), and Where I've Been and Where I'm Going (essays and reviews). Her poetry has appeared in Paris Review, Boulevard, The New Yorker, and APR. She teaches at Princeton University.

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