Through The Looking Glass

Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who are standing motionless. They have “DUM” and “DEE” embroidered on their collars, but otherwise, they look like twins. Alice wants to see if the word “Tweedle” is on their shirts’ backs, but they suddenly move and tease her that they aren’t wax statues. Alice shakes both their hands so that they will not feel like she picked a favorite boy. She recites a poem about the Tweedles fighting since they love to wrestle. Before they fight, Alice asks for directions out of the woods, which she wants to get out of before dark, but they keep ignoring her.

They recite a long poem called “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (125). In the poem, a walrus and a carpenter are walking through sand, lamenting that the sea has dried up. They invite baby oysters to join their walk but end up eating the friendly oysters in the end. Alice says she likes the Walrus better since he cried over eating the oysters, but the Tweedles say he ate the most oysters. She picks the Carpenter next, but they explain he ate as many as he could. Alice is confused by what the twins call the logic of the poem.