NPPF Commentary Line 230, P. 164

[Vincent A. Maeder]

Line 230: a domestic ghost

Line 230 is the last line of the 8th stanza of canto two.  Mr. Shade has
just completed an argument in the seventh stanza that if, before we came
to life, we tried to imagine life we would have dismissed such musings
as mere nonsense. Now in the eighth stanza, he completes the thought by
arguing that it is just as naïve for us to argue there is no hereafter
especially when all we can conjure up in our imagination for life in the
hereafter is "a domestic ghost."

Mr. Kinbote's commentary begins with a discussion he had with Jane
Provost, Mr. Shade's former secretary.  Interesting choice of character
name for the secretary -- secretaries run their offices and their bosses
in reality -- a provost is a high ranking administrative official at a
university or college (as well as the keeper of a prison, so which is it
you ask?)  The discussion concerns Mr. Shade's deceased daughter, Ms.
Hazel, and Mr. Kinbote's assessment of over-elaboration of Ms. Hazel.
In a humorous moment, Mr. Kinbote, nose held in the air, stating in his
stubborn manner completely devoid of what the poem is really about,
insists that the picture of hazel is "a little too complete,
architectonically, since the reader cannot help feeling that it has been
expanded and elaborated to the detriment of certain richer and rarer
matters ousted by it."  Meaning, Mr. Kinbote himself and his kingdom.
"But," Mr. Kinbote says, and we can hear his heaved sigh - SIGH - "a
commentator's obligations cannot be shirked, however dull the
information he must collect and convey."  Almost as if he gives us
permission to move along and skip the note entirely.  Oh but why?

Perhaps it is because Mr. Kinbote's commentary ultimately mirrors Mr.
Shade's argument laid out in the text.  Having referred to several
psychokinetic events in the Shade home (some very humorous), Mr. Kinbote
comments that in reaching for an explanation for the events, the natural
mind reaches for the more commonplace explanation of a child merely
acting out rather than what appears to us the supernatural -- as Mr.
Kinbote says, "actually the scientific and the supernatural, the miracle
of the muscle and the miracle of the mind are both inexplicable . . ."