Everybody's going mad. everybody's going mad. (20)

"If (21) ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body,

And give the letter which thou find'st about me

To Edmund Earl of Gloucester. Seek him out

Upon the British party. O, untimely death! Death!

I know thee well. A serviceable villain,

As duteous to the vices of thy mistress

As badness would desire.

What, is he dead?

Sit you down, father; rest you."

1) together also means good, cool. 2) from "Three Blind Mice." 3) see note nine. 4) Alice (in Wonderland) shrinking and shrunk. 5) from the asylum? 6) walrus's face is long. 7) The eggman is H. C. Earwicker in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. He is the cosmic father of man and is symbolic of the oosphere. The oosphere contained the universe at the beginning before it was broken. His initials stand for "Here Comes Everybody". The eggman is everybody. 8) Everybody is an eggman because we're all progenitors.

9) from Lewis Carroll's story of the Walrus and the Carpenter. The Walrus cries while he eats the oysters he has tricked into following him. 10) the sound of Finnegan falling--the breaking of the oosphere. 10a) "Man of" is a far more likely, and grammatical, interpretation of what the Beatles sing than "matter". 11) from an old English schoolboy's rhyme: "Alligator, crocodile, custard pie/All mixed together with a dead dog's eye/Spread it on a sandwich nice and thick/ And swallow it down with a cup of cold sick" 11a) If this isn't Capitol's inaccurate estimation of "Grab a lock of", then the Beatles have created a nonsense in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, one that (intentionally) sounds like the first phrase. 12) i.e. panties. 13) mumbled in the background. 13a) cross between "textbook" and preceding word. 14) hippies with pot. 15) i.e. they're snide. 16) an awful English pudding. 17) literally a fish dish of the same grade as semolina pudding; more likely is an abomination of "filcher", meaning in this context a hippie so degraded that he has to steal, violating the hippie ethics. 18) to jump? 19) the Penguin textbook editions; here means people who haven't read farther. The word is actually plural in the song, and is an appositive of choking smokers. 20) chanted repeatedly by a host. 21) the death of Oswald from King Lear: act IV, scene vi, lines 246-253.

The Beatles are putting down everyone--the eggman (the primordial progenitor of mankind) and also the eggmen, all the people walking around today producing and propagating. We're all Lewis Carroll's walrus, crying while we destroy the young but destroying them anyway.

In the Walrus the merrieness has gone out of the Beatles' laughter. Sure, we still laugh with the joker at the choking smokers, chuckle at the English garden, and smile knowingly at the pretty (a favorite put-down is to pretend they're fags) policemen.

In these sections it's the same Beatles who mocked the businessman in A Hard Day's Night with "give us a kiss". Here and there, things are still fun; but everywhere else it's a violiny, morbid picture of the degrading lives that England's eggmen--everyone from the hippies to the cops to the worker in the corporation teashirt--are falling into.