The Hunting of the Snark Gardner sees the poem as dealing with existential angst, and states that the Baker may be Carroll's satire of himself, pointing to the fact that the Baker was named after a beloved uncle, as was Carroll, and that the two were around the same age at the time of the writing of the poem. Alternatively, Larry Shaw of the fan magazine "Inside and Science Fiction Advertiser" suggests that the Boots, being the Snark, actually murdered the Baker. Also references to religious issues had been suggested, like the Baker's 42 boxes being a reference to Thomas Cranmer's "Forty-Two Articles" with a
The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem idea of nightingale as melancholic, the poem relies on the tradition and gothic descriptions to guide the poem. Eventually, the nightingale is what brings the narrator back to his topic after diverging from it in a manner similar to John Keats's use in "Ode to a Nightingale". Unlike tradition, the nightingales represented an experience that Coleridge had with his friends, the Wordsworths. During the moment within the poem, a female is described that seems to be a combination of Dorothy and the title character of "Christabel". There is no mention of Coleridge's wife, Sara, which separates "The Nightingale" from the