NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[s~Z]

>>>Pope has always seemed the touchstone here and Rape of the Lock is a good
guess as to Nabokov's intended tone.<<<

And a subtitle for the poem Pale Fire could be "The Rape of the Shade"
couldn't it? Doesn't the imagery of the first two Cantos suggest Aunt Maud
forced Shade to quench her thirst with his pure tongue? Isn't the truth
being hidden from him, not so much truth about survival after death, but the
truth that his memory has dimmed regarding being forced to orally pleasure
Aunt Maud? My favorite references are how his childish palate loved the
taste/Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste (nature's glue, lines
103-5), -- the cryptic erotic description of lines 147-156, "How ludicrous
these efforts to translate/Into one's private tongue a public fate!" (lines
231-2) and

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.
                      Espied on a pine's bark.
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant. (235-40)

Aunt Maud = a 'gum'-logged aunt.

Ant = insect
Aunt = incest