The Walrus and the Carpenter

Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is made up of 18 sestets (six-line stanzas). The meter is iambic and alternates between lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. An iamb is a metrical foot that consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM). A tetrameter is a line with four of these metrical feet (typically eight syllables total), while a trimeter is a line with three feet (typically six syllables total).

In “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” the first, third, and fifth lines of each stanza are iambic tetrameters, while the second, fourth, and sixth lines are iambic trimeters. The poem also employs an ABCBDB rhyme scheme—“sea” (Line 1), “might” (Line 2), “make” (Line 3), “bright” (Line 4), “was” (Line 5), and “night” (Line 6). The meter Carroll uses in the poem is thus a kind of expansion of the ballad stanza, a popular type of quatrain (four-line stanza) with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter and with an ABCB rhyme scheme, all of which contribute to easy recitation.

In English poetry, iambic feet can sometimes be substituted in order to create a more dynamic and interesting