One of John Lennon’s favorite Beatles songs was “I Am the Walrus.” It’s also one of the band’s most confounding tunes. Based on the Lewis Carroll poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Through the Looking-Glass, Lennon wrote intentionally confusing lyrics. He explained that when he went back over the source poem, he realized he’d misinterpreted it. He’d written the song about the wrong character.
John Lennon didn’t realize ‘I Am the Walrus’ was about the villain
Lennon appreciated that “I Am the Walrus” was a song that listeners could find new meaning in every time they heard it. He wrote it based on “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a poem he admitted to not understanding until after writing the song.
“It’s from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’; Alice in Wonderland,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with The Beatles’ work.”
He also hadn’t realized that the Walrus was the villain of the poem. He’d liked the image of him from the film Alice in Wonderland so much that he’d written him into the song.
“Later I went back and looked at it and realised that the Walrus was the bad guy in the story, and the Carpenter was the good guy,” Lennon explained. “I thought, ‘Oh, s***, I’ve picked the wrong guy.’ But it wouldn’t have been the same, would it? ‘I Am the Carpenter…’ We saw the movie in LA, and the Walrus was a big capitalist that ate all the f***ing oysters. I always had the image of the Walrus in the garden and I loved it, and so I didn’t ever check what the Walrus was. He’s a f***ing bastard — that’s what he turns out to be.”
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John Lennon said the lyrics to ‘I Am the Walrus’ don’t mean much
Lennon loved the song and especially liked that it didn’t have much meaning.
“‘Walrus’ is just saying a dream — the words don’t mean a lot,” he explained. “People draw so many conclusions and it’s ridiculous.”
Lennon and the other Beatles sometimes found it exhausting when their fans pored over lyrics for hidden messages. “I Am the Walrus” could have been about anything; in a way, it was a joke at the expense of these fans.
“I’ve had tongue in cheek all along — all of them tongue in cheek,” Lennon said. “Just because other people see depths of whatever in it … What does it really mean, ‘I am the eggman’? It could have been the pudding basin, for all I care. It’s not that serious.”
The BBC banned ‘I Am the Walrus’
Though Lennon said the song had no meaning, the BBC banned it. The line “pornographic priestess/Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down” landed them in trouble. The band couldn’t use the words “pornographic” or “knickers,” so the network banned the song. This did little, if anything, to impact the band’s success.
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