Structure
The poem has some aspects characteristic of much of Carroll's poetry: it utilizes technically adept meter and rhyme, grammatically correct phrasing, logical chains of events—and largely nonsensical content, frequently employing made-up words such as "Snark". It is by far his longest poem; unlike Alice, which is prose with occasional poems within the text, the Snark rhymes from start to end. The poem is divided into eight sections or "fits" (a pun on fit, meaning a part of a song, and fit, meaning a seizure or convulsion—hence, "An Agony in 8 Fits"):
- The Landing
- The Bellman's Speech
- The Baker's Tale
- The Hunting
- The Beaver's Lesson
- The Barrister's Dream
- The Banker's Fate
- The Vanishing
Read more about this topic: The Hunting Of The Snark
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“Each structure and institution here was so primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A special feature of the structure of our book is the monstrous but perfectly organic part that eavesdropping plays in it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)