NPPF Canto 1 "that golden paste!"

[jbor]

on 29/7/03 2:42 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> John's lameness might have been the result of rickets, which kids who
> didn't play out in the sunshine were especially prone to--from an
> insufficiency of natural vitamin D production.

I think this is a valid insight. One of the main things about Canto One is
how much of it is looking out into "nature" from *inside* the house. Apart
from the favourite tree on his walk to school, a walk which he seems to have
repeated for the exercise of writing the poem, and the report of which lets
us know that he was constantly looking back to see the porch of the house
from the lake (for reassurance?) on his way to school which is perhaps why
it *was* his favourite spot, most of the rest of the Canto sees him
(imaginatively) walking from room to room in the house, remembering people
and things. Apart from this it's all very much an "indoor scene" (even the
passage where he goes "up the hill" and claims to have "walked at my own
risk" seems to have taken place only in his imagination), which makes his
pretension to have been inspired and exalted by "nature" ("How fully I felt
nature glued to me ... !") seem somewhat grandiloquent.

He writes:

                                    Then as now
        I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough
        Tripped by the stump. (127-9)

The "[t]hen as now" reinforces the irony of this because he cancels or
curtails most of his walks with Kinbote if I recall correctly (but perhaps
that's just because of Kinbote). But there does seem to be something very
fishy in this assumption that Shade is a great nature poet à la Wordsworth.
He seems hardly to have ventured beyond this one house in his whole life.

best

ps Apparently the poem is not written in "heroic couplets". It's written in
what I read somewhere are called "run-on couplets"

pps The only part of the Canto that I can see as referring to Aunt Maud is
the stanza from lines 86-98.