So, I wonder... Who or what is the "Fourth" in Pale Fire?       Jansy

A river in Scotland?..   Hazel Shade, whose name has a Scottish source, seems to have died there... half-in-jest, Carolyn
 
See" said he, "no one could find his way into Grimpen Mire tonight". She laughed and clapped her hands, her eyes and teeth gleamed with fierce merriment. "He may find his way in, but never out" she cried.
    - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of The Baskervilles)
 
You may be correct. The fourth would not be a "tetrapartite" novel ( Foreword, Poem, Commentary, Index) nor the poem itself, with its Four Cantos.
I had been thinking about the "hereafter".  Other developments about triptych and Van Veen's theories about past-present-future seem to deny any vision of that!
( I'll send the quotes later)
Jansy

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