NPPF: Commentary 4(summary and notes) Lines 413, 417-421, 426, 431

[bekah]

Line 413 "a nymph came pirouetting"

vs draft, "a nymphette pirouetted"

I liked Shade's version better myself. It's more interesting. But considering his preference for the very young and small,  Kinbote would probably prefer the draft.


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Line 417-421  "I went upstairs, etc."

The draft explains what's "actually happening" more clearly than the "final" verses. Because Kinbote had said previously that he italicized Hazel's lines in the Canto's passages, the italicization of the line, "'See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,'" had me boggled. Was that happening to Hazel? Was she playing the fool?

But in the commentary to those lines I see where Shade has quoted Pope's "Essay on Man" and is probably doing the italicizing himself.  But there are many other italicized words and lines; are they Shade's or Kinbotes? (I'd say Shade's because Kinbote tells us if he does it.)

** See  "Essay on Man" by Alexander Pope EPISTLE II:
Of the Nature and State of Man, With Respect to Himself as an Individual
Section VI, lines 19-20  <http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/pope-e2.html>

Kinbote doesn't get it, naturally. He figures Shade removed the draft lines because of possible offense to a "real king." And Kinbote critiques Pope on his rhyming and Shade for being flabby and wonders if Shade really has guessed his "secret".

Btw, "Supremely Bless'd" (the name of Shade's book) is from 2 lines down in "Essay on Man." The whole sentence from Pope reads:

"'See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king,
The starving chymist in his golden views
Supremely bless'd, the poet in his Muse."


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Line 426 "Just behind (one oozy footstep) Frost"

I think that we have to put ourselves back into 1961 or so. Robert Frost died in 1963. This means that Shade was comparing himself, albeit "behind," to a living author, not a deceased American Hero. Robert Frost was named  Inaugural Poet for President John F. Kennedy, 1961 Poet Laureate of Vermont  both in 1961. He'd been awarded several Pulitzers, as had numerous other poets of the day.

And there are distinct comparisons. They were both naturalists. They started from where they were and spread outward to the universal. We only have the poems of Pale Fire Shade for a comparison. We have hundreds by Frost and some are better than others. We don't have any poems by Frost on the suicide of his daughter.

So it is possible, albeit with a small stretch, to accept Shade's work at the time as being "one oozy footstep" behind Frost. And Nabokov's snowflakes don't quite settle like Frost's either.


Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

There is an Atlantic Monthly article by Mark Van Doren (another important poet of the times) from June, 1951 at <http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/frost/vand.htm>,


And I found this very early naturalist poem by Frost, written in 1912:

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On the white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches broth-
A snow-drop spider, a flower like froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to apall?-
If design govern in a thing so small.

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Line 431 "March night...headlights from afar approached"

"...the television theme merges with the girl's theme."  Well, indeed it does if the Shades are, just moments before she died, watching a travelogue of the area where the girl was conceived. At least Kinbote is paying attention to someone else's grief although he's focused on technique rather than the tension and shadow.


Bekah