The Hunting of The Snark - Origins

Origins

In the course of his career, Lewis Carroll developed an elegant and morally impeccable technique to fend off demands asking him to explain his work. However it is phrased, his answer is always the same: I don't know. This was the truth, although not in the sense that children and reviewers understood it: Carroll would not explain the meaning of his books because "a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant". Gardner gives half a dozen examples. Here is how Carroll "explained" the Snark in 1887:

I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse – one solitary line – "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but I wrote it down: and, sometime afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say

In the midst of his laughter and glee

He had softly and suddenly vanished away

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Morton Cohen, in his biography of Charles Dodgson (Carroll), connects the poem to the illness of Carroll's godson Charlie Wilcox. The 22 year old came down with tuberculosis, and Carroll nursed him through the long nights. It was a sorrowful task, seeing the young man consumed by fever and pain weighed heavily on him. The next morning, after 3 hours' sleep, he left the sickroom to walk on the Surrey Downs; he needed to get away, breathe fresh air. This was the bright summer day when the solitary Boojum line came into his mind. The sudden disappearance of the Baker is not unlike the sudden death that overcame the young man.