“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father. “Don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

These lines come from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “You Are Old, Father William,” embedded in Chapter 5 (“Advice from a Caterpillar”) of *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland* (1865). In the scene, Alice tries to recite the moralistic poem “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them” by Robert Southey, but—under the story’s dreamlike logic—her memory produces a distorted, comic version instead. The quoted stanza is part of the poem’s back-and-forth between a questioning child and the irritable “Father William,” whose increasingly absurd feats and impatient replies parody didactic Victorian verse and the expectation that poems should deliver improving lessons.

The stanza satirizes the authority figure who demands deference while refusing genuine inquiry. The child’s repeated questions, typical of moral instruction poems, are met not with wisdom but with bluster and threat (“Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”). Carroll turns the expected edifying exchange into farce: the father’s impatience and aggression undercut any claim to moral superiority, while the exaggerated domestic violence heightens the absurdity. Within *Alice*, the misrecitation underscores the instability of language and learning in Wonderland—rules, lessons, and “proper” recitations collapse into nonsense—while also poking fun at the rote, punitive tone that could accompany Victorian pedagogy.