Context

After drinking from the bottle marked 'DRINK ME,' Alice abruptly grows so tall that she imagines herself 'opening out like the largest telescope that ever was' and bids farewell to her own feet. This exclamation is her involuntary first response to the transformation.

How the repetition works

Diacope — broad-form epizeuxis with a short connective (here, “and” or “the”) between the repeated words. About this distinction →

Most epizeuxis in the catalogue intensifies feeling through identical repetition ('never, never,' 'tomorrow and tomorrow'). Carroll instead repeats a comparative-form adjective ('curiouser') joined by 'and,' so the figure performs grammatical escalation: each iteration is meant to be more curious than the last. Carroll's parenthetical aside — Alice 'quite forgot how to speak good English' — is itself a gloss on the device, framing epizeuxis as the natural reach of a mind whose ordinary syntax can't keep up with experience.