Lewis Carroll's famous flight of fantasy Through the Looking-Glass, a sequel to the even more famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, contains a lot of nonsense poetry, much of which relates to fish. As I recall, the same is true of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland too, but it's in Through the Looking-Glass that Alice explicitly remarks on this in the story:
‘Do you know, I’ve had such a quantity of poetry repeated to me to-day,’ Alice began, a little frightened at finding that, the moment she opened her lips, there was dead silence, and all eyes were fixed upon her; ‘and it’s a very curious thing, I think—every poem was about fishes in some way. Do you know why they’re so fond of fishes, all about here?’
She never gets an answer to this question, only yet another poem about fish. From an out-of-universe literary analysis perspective, can we answer the question better than the Queens could?
Why is so much of the Alice poetry about fish, and is there any significance or symbolism in this?
