I wrote last week of a happy marriage by way of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem, “The Owl and the Pussy-cat,” with its Bong-Tree and runcible spoon.

I’ve always been fond of nonsense poems, and the Victorian variety in particular, exemplified by Mr. Lear and his supremely talented contemporary Charles Dodgson, better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll.

One of the requirements of my ninth grade English class was to memorize — and recite — Carroll’s most famous nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” from Through the Looking-glass. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, here are the opening stanzas:

Jabberwocky

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!’

The heroine of Through the Looking-glass, the little girl named Alice, finds the poem in a book, but can’t make heads or tails of it — not on account of the unfamiliar words, but because the book is printed in reverse. Only when she looks at the poem in a mirror can she read it. And then the trouble really begins.

What is a Jabberwock, exactly? And what does it mean to be “Jabberwocky,” as in the title of the poem? What is a tove, a borogove, a Jubjub bird, or a Bandersnatch? What to make of adjectives like “slithy,” “mimsy,” and “frumious?”

Alice reads the entire poem but doesn’t understand very much of it.

‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s RATHER hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that’s clear, at any rate — ‘

In a hurry to explore the strange new world she’s discovered by passing through the mirror in her drawing room, Alice floats downstairs to the garden, leaving the poem and its frustrations behind.

But it gnaws at her, as adult mysteries tend to do in the minds of children. Alice revisits the poem in Chapter Six in an extremely awkward encounter with Humpty Dumpty, an imperious talking egg who’s quite a fount of nonsense himself.

Humpty Dumpty enjoys an extremely unconventional — and intimate — relationship with words:

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. ‘They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs, they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’

‘Would you tell me, please,’ said Alice ‘what that means?’

‘Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. ‘I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.’

‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’

Humpty Dumpty goes on to assert that whenever he uses a word, it means exactly what he wants it to mean — no more, no less. Impressed with his bona fides as a linguist, Alice asks for his help deciphering “Jabberwocky.” It’s here that readers are given a glimpse behind the curtain of Carroll’s verbal creativity. Humpty Dumpty demystifies words like “slithy” by breaking them into distinct roots — “lithe” and “slimy.” The new hybrid word is called a “portmanteau,” after a suitcase that opens into two equally sized compartments. One part “lithe” plus one part “slimy” equals “slithy.”

Grown-up readers of “Jabberwocky” may be interested to know that Dodgson wrote the poem two decades before he used it in Through the Looking-glass, not as an experiment in word construction, but as a parody of Anglo-Saxon, a language Dodgson found delightfully incomprehensible.

Professional linguists may recognize in Humpty Dumpty’s treatise on word-creation an echo of the ancient Greek philosopher Cratylus, whose dialogue with Socrates on the question of intrinsic meaning follows along similar lines. Cratylus argues that words don’t have any meaningful relationship to the things they name. Since words are essentially arbitrary, mutually agreed-upon conventions which owe everything to context, Humpty Dumpty is correct: when he uses a word, it means exactly what he wants it to, no more, no less.

This kind of thinking has shaped our times: in the 1970s, the study of philosophy was swept by a tsunami of uncertainty called “Deconstruction,” which argued that language was so unstable, there was no such thing as meaning, per se — much less something you could call a writer’s “intention.”

Lest you think we’ve gotten too far afield from the high nonsense of Through the Looking-glass, it’s worth remembering that Dodgson was a serious man, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford University whose professional interests included symbolic logic. He was certainly preoccupied with the relationship between words and meaning.

Even so, I think there’s a more down-to-earth reason for the enduring reputation of his nonsense poems: they remind of us of our own infancy, when every day was a struggle to make sense of words, both written and spoken, and every conversation a springboard for pleasure, frustration, and bewilderment.