No birds were flying overhead, there were no birds to fly

(продолжение)

Интересны рассуждения Гарднера вокруг фразы Герцогини "Take care of the senses and the sounds will take care of themselves", которая пародирует пословицу "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves."

There is an obvious similarity between nonsense verse of this sort and an abstract painting. The realistic artist is forced to copy nature, imposing on the copy as much as he can in the way of pleasing forms and colors; but the abstract artist is free to romp with the paint as much as he pleases. In similar fashion the nonsense poet does not have to search for ingenious ways of combining pattern and sense; he simply adopts a policy that is the opposite of the advice given by the Duchess in the previous book — he takes care of the sounds and allows the sense to take care of itself. The words he uses may suggest vague meanings, like an eye here and a foot there in a Picasso abstraction, or they may have no meaning at all—just a play of pleasant sounds like the play of nonobjective colors on a canvas.

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Since the time of Lear and Carroll there have been attempts to produce a more serious poetry of this sort—poems by the Dadaists, the Italian futurists, and Gertrude Stein, for example—but somehow when the technique is taken too seriously the results seem tiresome. I have yet to meet someone who could recite one of Miss Stein's poetic efforts, but I have known a good many Carrollians who found that they knew the "Jabberwocky" by heart without ever having made a conscious effort to memorize it. <...> "Jabberwocky" has a careless lilt and perfection that makes it the unique thing it is.

Martin Gardner. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition.