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The tone of “Jabberwocky” is mock-serious and satirical. As a nonsense verse that originally appeared in a fantastical tale written for children, the poem’s evident seriousness has a humorous effect. Consider the third stanza (lines 9–12), which recounts how the boy sets off on his quest to slay the Jabberwocky:

     He took his vorpal sword in hand;
     Long time the manxome foe he sought—
     So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
     And stood awhile in thought.

The first line of this quatrain describes the son preparing for his quest by taking his “vorpal sword in hand.” We have no idea what “vorpal” means, but it seems to designate a weapon worthy of a hero. Likewise, the following line uses inverted syntax to confer an elevated sense of gravitas on the boy’s journey: “Long time the manxome foe he sought.” This kind of syntactical inversion could be understood as a satire of the romance genre, which featured many stories of noble, questing knights. But the boyish hero of “Jabberwocky” is no knight; he’s a child in a made-up world populated with silly things like “Tumtum” trees, which seem better suited to nursery rhymes. Furthermore, Carroll’s use of fancy-sounding nonce words like “manxome” satirizes pretentious poetry of his day, as well as the critics who devoted themselves to deciphering that poetry. “Jabberwocky” would seem to give these critics much to do, indeed!

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