Hailey Hoffman
International Relations
Poems: “Eight Supplemental Verses to Lewis Carroll’s ‘You Are Old, Father William,’” 2005

When Alice meets up with the Caterpillar, he asks her to recite a poem called “You Are Old, Father William.” This short poem is Lewis Carroll’s whimsical response to a sentimental work from 1799 by Romantic poet Robert Southey, called “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them.” Hoffman’s verses supplement and update Carroll’s parody; playing off his love of word games she advises the reader that her verses “may be interjected into Carroll’s poem at random in sets of two—one question by the son and one response by the father—as long as they do not displace the first or the last verses, which nicely introduce and conclude the poem.”