Read down the left-hand edge of this poem and a second message appears. The first letters of the eight lines in the opening stanza spell ADELAIDE, and the five lines of the second spell PAINE. The verses are a parcel wrapped around a name, presumably that of the "little maid dwelling in Wallington Town" whom the young man mentions. The comedy on the surface and the compliment underneath work together, and only a reader who looks past the sense of the lines will find the second.
The comedy borrows its cast from "You Are Old, Father William," the verse dialogue in *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland*, where a brash young man questions an old one. Here the roles shift. The young man still shouts, but he wants a favour, and the old man answers with orders instead of cheeky replies. The subtitle, "In the style of Father William," asks us to hear that echo: a bold youth, a stubborn elder, and a clash between them.
The first stanza is a small masterpiece of bad manners. "Are you deaf, Father William!" is a bellow, yet in the next line the young man says, "Excuse me for shouting!" The apology comes just before the insult, which turns the old man's nodding head into "a blundering, sleepy old cow." The cow is a good choice of image, since it suggests slow, placid, mildly dim motion. Then the young man's courage gives out. He does not ask for permission to send a gift. He asks whether the girl "would be pleased if a book were sent down," and the passive verb lets nobody take responsibility for the sending. The book is named as 'The Hunt of the Snark?', a slight trimming of the title of Carroll's own nonsense poem, perhaps to keep the line's beat. The title lands on the rhyme word, "remark" and "Snark" clicking together, so the gift gets the stanza's last word.
The rhythm helps. The lines bounce along in a gallop of unstressed syllables, with longer lines alternating with shorter ones, and the ABAB rhymes (said/head, now/cow) have a lilting, nursery-rhyme ring. That cheerfulness keeps the insults from stinging. In the second stanza the pattern changes. There are five lines instead of four, rhyming ABAAB, and three of them end in the same sound: "cried," "pride," "beside." The repeated rhyme feels like the old man puffing himself up. The most sprawling line is his own: "Nor forget, my good fellow to send her beside." It runs on and spills past the rhythm, as if he keeps remembering new orders.
His grandeur is the joke of the second half. Called a cow a moment ago, he now says "I command you to do it!" and the poem tells us he does so "with pride." He wants the parcel packed "in brown paper" and sealed "with olive-and-dove," a hyphenated phrase that sounds like a coat of arms. The olive branch and dove are old emblems of peace, so the seal turns a homely parcel into a state document. Yet the old man was never deaf. He heard everything and approved, so the young man's shouting and apologising were wasted.
The ending drops the pomp. "Easter Greetings, and give her my love" is plain and warm, and it supplies the final E of PAINE, so the name closes on affection. The mention of Easter suggests the occasion, though the poem never says so outright.
As a piece of writing this is a slight thing, and part of its charm is that it knows it. What makes it worth reading is how neatly the name is hidden. Nothing in the sense strains to fit the letters, so the sentences read as natural talk while carrying a dedication. A reader who stops at the story gets a joke about rude youth and pompous age. One who reads down the margin finds that the whole exchange was a way of saying a girl's name, and the poem offers the puzzle as a gift.