NPPF: Canto Two -- Additional Notes

[Jasper Fidget]

ln 167: "There was a time in my demented youth"

Perhaps a reference to Wordsworth's _Intimations of Immortality_ Ode which
begins:

"THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,   
    The earth, and every common sight,   
            To me did seem   
    Apparell'd in celestial light,   
The glory and the freshness of a dream."

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ln 180: "Devoting all my twisted life to this"
ln 181: "One task. Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings."

As I've suggested before, the idea or goal of immortality or life after
death from between the borders of life represented visually through the
number itself: 181.  See also 1881 and the Butterfly of Doom (Lex Luthor's
insect pet).

ln 183: "The little scissors I am holding are / A dazzling synthesis of sun
and star"

Mirror motif in the scissors, synthesis, night and day, one and many.  Why
the passive voice progressive tense?

ln 185-186: "I stand before the window and I pare / My fingernails and
vaguely am aware", ln 245: "And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear"

When asked by Alfred Appel about this apparent allusion to Joyce, VN
replied: "Neither Kinbote nor Shade, nor their maker, is answering Joyce in
_Pale Fire_.  Actually, I never liked _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man_. I find it a feeble and garrulous book.  The phrase you quote is an
unpleasant coincidence." (_Strong Opinions_, 70-71)

ln 231: see K's variant pg 167

ln 316: See 183-184 for K's variant: "In woods Virginia Whites occurred in
May"

ln 343: "With a Korean boy who took my course": He shows up for Shade's
birthday party on page 160.

ln 368: "Grim Pen": Another cage.

ln 419: see variant on pg 202.

ln 423: "I was in time to overhear brief fame": Illusory immortality.

ln 500: "Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank."

The dead center of the poem.  Hazel, like Ophelia, drowns.  See also Sir
Walter Scott's _The Lady of the Lake_, which includes the lines: 

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade...."

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Jasper