NPPF: Commentary 1 (summary and notes) Lines 376-377, 384, 385-386,

[Jasper Fidget]

> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of bekah

> 
> An enigmatic line ends the little section,
> "Southey liked a roasted rat for supper - which
> is especially comic in view of the rats that
> devoured his Bishop." This is apparently a double
> slam; he's referring to Paul H. eating crow and
> that he has been outmatched in the metaphoric
> chess game Kinbote thematically conjures up to
> keep the poem.
> 


See Robert Southey's poem "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop," wherein said
Bishop burns a barn full of poor people in order to rid it "in these times
forlorn / Of Rats that only consume the corn."  Later an Army of Rats show
up to great comic effect:

They have whetted their teeth against the stones,
And now they pick the Bishop's bones:
They gnaw'd the flesh from every limb,
For they were sent to do judgment on him!

http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1956.html


> ****************
> 
> Lines 385-386  "Jane Dean, Pete Dean"
> 

p. 196
"a glorious young athlete whose 'garland' will not, one hopes, be 'briefer
than a girl's'."

>From A.E. Houseman's "To An Athlete Dying Young" (1896)

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

http://staff.bcc.edu/jalexand/Houseman--To_%20An_%20Athlete.htm

Jasper Fidget