Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 19, 2026
I had a theory I could not shake, and I want to work it out in public because I think it is half right in a way that is more interesting than being wholly right.
The theory is that "I Am the Walrus" is about the devil.
Now, before anybody reaches for the obvious objection: I am not doing the thing where you play a record backwards and hear an incantation. That whole tradition — the burnings, the church basements, the hidden messages in the run-out groove — was a moral panic that got a lot of ordinary music badly misread. What I am doing is simpler and, I think, defensible. I am reading the source Lennon actually used.
The Walrus is not Lennon's invention. He took it from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, from the poem where a Walrus and a Carpenter take a stroll along a beach and fall in with a company of young oysters.
The Walrus is charming about it. He is companionable. He talks pleasantly of many things, and he invites the oysters to walk with him, and then he and his colleague eat every last one — and while eating them, the Walrus weeps. Carroll gives him tears. He sorts through the ones he has already consumed and expresses sympathy for their fate with his mouth full.
That is a deceiver who leads the innocent somewhere pleasant and consumes them while performing grief about it. Written for children, in 1871.
You do not have to import any theology to find the devil in that. Carroll had already put him there.
Here is what makes this more than a clever reading, and it is the reason I could not let the thought go.
Lennon wrote the song in 1967 for a reason that had nothing to do with any of this. A student at his old school had written to tell him that the English master was making the class analyze Beatles lyrics as poetry. Lennon, delighted and irritated in equal measure, set out to write something that would defeat analysis on purpose — schoolyard rhymes, images assembled across separate acid trips, deliberate nonsense. He told a friend to let them work that one out, in blunter language.
And then, thirteen years later, in his 1980 Playboy interview, he admitted he had misread the poem he took the title from. It had never dawned on him, he said, that Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. He had gone back and looked and realized the walrus was the bad guy and the carpenter was the good guy.
Then he says the thing I keep turning over:
"I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?"
— John Lennon, Playboy interview with David Sheff, 1980
He concedes the error and refuses the correction in the same breath. He knows the villain is load-bearing. I am the carpenter is a man telling you he is fine. I am the walrus is something else, and Lennon could hear it even after he understood what he had confessed to.
I wrote a few weeks ago about Warhol insisting there was nothing behind the surface — that if you wanted to know all about him you could just look, and there was nothing underneath. It was a real position and also a defense, and the effect of it was to hand the work back to whoever was standing in front of it. The depth was never on the canvas.
Lennon's work it out yourselves is the same posture with a Liverpool accent. Both men declared their work empty. Both were overruled.
Because the thing a maker does not get is jurisdiction over what he has made. You can write nonsense on purpose and still say something, and you can be the last person in the room to find out what it was. Meaning does not require the author's cooperation, and occasionally it arrives over his objection. Lennon spent thirteen years as a man who had accidentally called himself a predator and did not know it.
That is not a failure of authorship. It is what authorship is, and I find it more encouraging than the alternative.
Which brings me to the comparison that made me want to write this down.
A year after "I Am the Walrus," the Rolling Stones released "Sympathy for the Devil." That one is genuinely about the devil, and deliberately so. Marianne Faithfull had given Jagger a copy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, in which Satan arrives in Soviet Moscow as a cultured gentleman named Woland; Jagger was also reading Baudelaire, whose whole subject is how civilized evil can be made to look. The song opens with the devil introducing himself as a man of wealth and taste.
The context matters too. The Stones had just released Their Satanic Majesties Request, widely panned as a psychedelic Beatles imitation, and "Sympathy" was the correction — narrative, rhythmic, unmistakably theirs.
So: two songs, one accidental devil and one intentional one. And I think the accidental one is scarier, for a specific reason.
Jagger's devil introduces himself. He is announced, named, courteous, and in period costume. You know exactly what has entered the room, which means you can brace. A devil who hands you a business card is a devil you can decline.
The Walrus never announces anything. He suggests a walk. The oysters are not warned, the poem does not editorialize, and the man who put the creature at the center of his song had no idea for thirteen years what he had picked up. Nothing in it declares itself.
Which is, incidentally, closer to how the tradition actually describes the thing. Scripture does not warn about a well-dressed gentleman making an entrance. It warns about something that appears as an angel of light — that the danger looks like the opposite of danger. A friend on a beach, being companionable, suggesting a walk.
Not in the way I first meant it. Lennon was not writing about Satan; he was writing to defeat a schoolteacher.
But he reached into English literature for a sinister animal, and the one he pulled out was a deceiver who eats the trusting and cries about it afterward. That figure did not need to be smuggled in. It was already sitting in the toybox, because it is one of the oldest shapes we have, and if you grope around in the dark for something menacing you will find your hand on it.
The songwriter's job is not always to know what he is doing. Sometimes it is to reach into the dark and be honest about what comes back, including thirteen years later when he can finally see it.
I should have said, I am the carpenter.
But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?