Hiawatha Takes a Photograph

The distinctive rhythm and tricks of speech that Henry Longfellow used in his narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) were just begging to be parodied. Lewis Carroll could not resist the temptation, nor could he resist descending from the lofty tale of a Native American warrior to suburban photography, in which Carroll was an early pioneer.

From his shoulder Hiawatha*
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the second book of Euclid.*
This he perched upon a tripod,
And the family in order
Sat before him for their pictures.
Mystic, awful was the process.

First, a piece of glass he coated
With Collodion,* and plunged it
In a bath of Lunar Caustic*
Carefully dissolved in water:
There he left it certain minutes.
Secondly, my Hiawatha
Made with cunning hand a mixture
Of the acid Pyro-gallic,*
And of Glacial Acetic,*
And of Alcohol and water:
This developed all the picture.
Finally, he fixed each picture
With a saturate solution
Of a certain salt of Soda —
Chemists call it Hyposulphite.*
(Very difficult the name is
For a metre like the present,
But periphrasis has done it.)

All the family in order
Sat before him for their pictures.
Each in turn, as he was taken,
Volunteered his own suggestions,
His invaluable suggestions.

Continue to Part 2

* Hiawatha was a historical Ojibwe warrior and leader of the Iroquois Confederacy in the twelfth century. Longfellow’s poem, however, was fiction. Carroll intended no disrespect to Hiawatha or to Longfellow. He explained his purpose himself:

“In these days of imitation, I can claim no sort of merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any one who knows what verse is, with the slightest ear for rhythm, can throw off a composition in the easy running metre of ‘The Song of Hiawatha’. Having, then, distinctly stated that I challenge no attention, in the following little poem, to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader, to confine his criticism, to its treatment of the subject.” As if to prove his point about the ease of parody, his note is in Longfellow’s rhythm too. For a sample of Longfellow’s style, see Hiawatha’s Inspiration.

* Euclid (fl. ?300 BC) was a Greek mathematician living in Alexandria, Egypt, remembered today chiefly for his contributions to geometry. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was by profession a tutor of mathematics at the University of Oxford.

* A kind of glue, used today mostly in medicine but in Carroll’s day used for photographic film.

* Silver nitrate.

* Pyrogallol.

* Anhydrous pure acetic acid.

* Sodium hyposulphite, known more commonly today as sodium thiosulphate.

Précis

Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: about, if, must, not, since, until, whereas, who.

Précis

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