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Have you ever had a bad dream? In Lewis Carroll’s poem Horrors , a little boy

is having a bad nightmare about a monster. Carroll writes this poem to make

people’s horrors funny. The poem is written to show the scared little boy’s

perspective and he isn’t speaking to someone directly, but he’s trying to intrigue

the reader. The setting is in the boy’s bedroom when the lights are out. He had a

nightmare about a monster so scary, the little boy woke up screaming. This poem

uses imagery to express people’s fears and how scared someone can get.

The poem, Horrors has a total of 4 stanzas that shift when there is a new

topic, but is related to the main point of the story. The first stanza’s purpose is to

describe the eeriness of the night. In the second and third stanza, the little boy

describes the monster he was dreaming about. He describes his features as “face

of grimmliest green, human beings use to feed, most dreadful to be seen.” The little

boy expresses how he fears being eaten by the monster. He also expresses to the

reader how frightened he is when he says “I could not speak, I fell down in that

place, I saw the monster’s horrid eye, come leering to my face.”

Another aspect of this poem is the use of imagery. Carroll uses a lot of

imagery, making his poem easy to picture. Examples of his use of imagery in

Horrors are: “grimmliest green, scarcely stifled groans, horrid eye, thick air, dismal

place, monster with speed.” Using imagery in this poem creates a feeling of fright

from images that you can see in your head.

This poem shows how scared people can get from what frightens them. This

monster in the boy’s dream scares him so much that he was forced to wake up

because his screams were so chilling. Carroll describes the monster as, “On human

beings used to feed,” which shows that this monster uses humans as food. The

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young boy is so scared that the monster might come and eat him. Robert Carroll

creates a scared atmosphere for his dreams by describing in his first stanze the

setting for the boy’s dream, “dim horrors all around, air was thick with many a face,

black as night the ground.” This creates the feeling of fright and mysterious mood.

Robert Carroll creates a feeling of mixed emotions in this poem. His use of

imagery creates eerie images of a monster. He describes how terrified this boy is

when he uses key words and phrases which show the reader a sense of fright.

Carroll’s use of imagery, playing with emotions, and showing people’s frights,

makes Horrors stand out and be a great poem.