The little girl in this instance was Gertrude Chataway, and the verses are an acrostic on her name:
Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
The tale he loves to tell.
Rude spirit of the seething outer strife,
Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright,
Deem, if you list, such hours a waste of life,
Empty of all delight!
Chat on, sweet maid, and rescue from annoy,
Hearts that by wiser talk are unbeguiled;
Ah, happy he who owns that tenderest joy,
The heart-love of a child!
Away, fond thoughts, and vex my soul no more!
Work claims my wakeful nights, my busy days,
Albeit bright memories of that sunlit shore
Yet haunt my dreaming gaze!
There was scarcely a little girl who claimed friendship with Lewis Carroll who was not the proud possessor of an acrostic poem written by him—either on the title-page of some book that he had given her, or as the dedication of some published book of his own.
“The Hunting of the Snark” owed its existence to a country walk, when the last verse came suddenly into the mind of our poet:
“In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.”
In a very humorous preface to the book, Lewis Carroll attempted some sort of an explanation, which leaves us as much in the dark as ever. He writes:
“If—and the thing is wildly possible—the charge of writing nonsense was ever brought against the author of this brief but instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line:
“‘Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.’
“In view of this painful possibility, I will not (as I might) appeal indignantly to my other writings as a proof that I am incapable of such a deed; I will not (as I might) point to the strong moral purpose of the poem itself, to the arithmetical principles so cautiously inculcated in it, or to its noble teachings in Natural History. I will take the more prosaic course of simply explaining how it happened.
“The Bellman, who was almost morbidly sensitive about appearances, used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished; and more than once it happened, when the time came for replacing it, that no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged to. They knew it was not of the slightest use to appeal to the Bellman about it—he would only refer to his Naval Code and read out in pathetic tones Admiralty Instructions which none of them had ever been able to understand, so it generally ended in its being fastened on anyhow across the rudder. The Helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong, but, alas! Rule 4, of the Code, ‘No one shall speak to the man at the helm,’ had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words, ‘and the man at the helm shall speak to no one,’ so remonstrance was impossible and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day. During these bewildering intervals the ship usually sailed backward.”