'Tis the Voice of the Lobster

"'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" is a poem by Lewis Carroll that appears in of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. As recited by Alice to the Mock Turtle* and the Gryphon, the first stanza describes a vain and stylish lobster who pretends not to fear sharks, but is in fact terrified by them. In the second stanza, an owl naively attempts to share a meat pie with a greedy panther. "Carroll wrote the second stanza of the nonsense poem in 1886 for the first theatrical adaptation of Alice." Although the poem's final line is left incomplete, the owl's unhappy fate is evident to the reader.

"'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" is a parody of "", a moralistic poem by Isaac Watts which was well known in Carroll's day. "The Sluggard" depicts the unsavory lifestyle of a slothful individual as a negative example. Carroll's lobster's corresponding vice is that he is weak and cannot back up his boasts, and is consequently easy prey. This fits the pattern of the predatory parody poems in the two Alice books. The Mock Turtle* is interesting in that he is created from typical Carrollean attention to duality of meaning; in this case that of ‘Mock Turtle Soup’, it being either not real turtle soup or real soup made from real mock-turtles!

Alice's recitation is suddenly interrupted by the Mock Turtle, who finds the poem "the most confusing thing I ever heard." It is generally assumed that the last words of the poem could be supplied as "— eating the Owl".

This poem is not to be conflated with a "Lobster Quadrille" that the Mock Turtle sings to Alice as he dances with the Gryphon. After the dance, Alice intends to recite the poem "Tis the voice of the sluggard", but "her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was saying" (Ch. 10).

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