Most poems about old age expect the old to hand down wisdom. Lewis Carroll's Father William does the opposite. Asked a series of reasonable questions by his son, he answers with a pun, a sales pitch, a bad joke about marriage, and finally a threat of violence. The poem is a parody. Carroll wrote it as a comic answer to a solemn, improving poem by Robert Southey, in which an old man credits his healthy old age to a well-spent youth. It is best known as the verse Alice recites, wrongly, in *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland*. Carroll keeps the shape of the moral lesson and drains out the morality.
The construction is tidy, and the tidiness makes the nonsense funnier. Eight quatrains rhyme ABAB, and they pair up into four rounds of question and answer. The son opens each round with the same formula, "You are old," and the father opens each reply with "In my youth." The rhythm is a bouncing, galloping beat, with longer lines alternating with shorter ones. It sounds like a nursery rhyme or a hymn learned by heart, which makes it easy to recite and gives every absurdity a straight face. When the son lists the evidence against his father ("your hair has become very white," "you have grown so uncommonly fat"), he sounds like a prosecutor. The father's replies are the defence, and they collapse at once.
The jokes in those replies work in different ways. The first is pure logic turned inside out. Father William once feared headstands "might injure the brain," but now he is "perfectly sure I have none." The second answer swerves from autobiography into advertising, with the price included: "one shilling a box--/Allow me to sell you a couple." The old sage becomes a street salesman, and the son becomes a customer. The third is a pun on the word "jaw," which means both the muscle and the talk of an argument. Father William built his jaw by arguing with his wife, and the joke is a small domestic grumble tucked inside a legal one. The rhymes join in, too. "Supple" and "couple" and "suet" and "do it" are double rhymes, and they have a clownish bounce that single rhymes lack.
The son is also worth a close look. He is not a sympathetic questioner. "As I mentioned before" shows he enjoys repeating himself, and his questions are less curious than accusing. Each one begins with what an old man ought not to be able to do, and the feats grow more outrageous. First comes standing on his head, then a somersault through the door. After that he finishes a whole goose, bones and beak included, and finally balances an eel on the end of his nose. The final question, "What made you so awfully clever?", sounds almost like flattery, but the son seems to want to catch his father out. He is an expectant pupil, waiting for a lesson.
That is why the ending lands so well. The pattern of four rounds suggests a fourth answer, and the father cuts it off: "I have answered three questions, and that is enough." Then he snaps, "don't give yourself airs!" and adds "Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!" The rhymes of "airs" and "downstairs" arrive with a thud. The reader has been promised wisdom, and what turns up is a short temper and a boot. The father is not a symbol of anything; he is a grumpy old man who has been talked at for too long, and he is allowed to win.
The poem matters because it shows how a parody can outlive its target. A reader doesn't need to know Southey to enjoy it. It pokes fun at the idea that the old are always sensible and the young must always listen. It makes the point through the sound and shape of verse itself, with a regular beat and tidy rhymes behind which nothing sensible is going on. Carroll understood that nonsense is funniest when it is delivered in perfect order.