What do these two lines in Lewis Carroll's "All in the golden afternoon..." mean? The poem, a preface to _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ , begins as follows: > All in the golden afternoon > Full leisurely we glide; > For both our oars, with little skill, > By little arms are plied, > **While little hands make vain pretence** > **Our wanderings to guide.** I've bolded the lines I don't understand. I understand what each of the individual words mean, but I'm not exactly sure how this "pretence," which could be a sort of make-believe playing of little children (Carroll is on a boat with three little girls), relates to the final line in the stanza. Since the first two pairs of lines go together, I'm wondering how I should interpret this last pair. Honestly I can't even visualize what "little hands make vain pretence" even depicts.

"make pretence" is a phrase meaning to pretend. If the pretence is vain, it means it was unsuccessful. So the first line you've bolded means that they were pretending unsuccessfully, but pretending to do what?

In the second line you've bolded, anastrophe is employed: changing the usual subject-verb-object order for the poetic purposes of rhyme and rhythm. "Our wanderings" is the object and "to guide" is the verb.

So you could rephrase the whole thing as:

> while little hands pretended unsuccessfully to guide our wanderings.

It means that the children's efforts at the oars may be trying (or pretending) to send the boat in particular directions, but in reality they are moving in a more uncontrolled way across the water.