And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate.
I would like to propose another reason for the “apple on a plate,” which incidentally I do not see (pace R.S. Gwynn) as referring to Shade’s childhood any more than I think the rest of the first verse paragraph does. Kinbote in his Note may wish to “visualize John Shade in his early boyhood, a physically unattractive but otherwise beautifully developed lad,” but there is no reason I can see in Shade’s poem to assume the first twelve lines refer to his childhood. Indeed the quality of the imagination Shade attributes to himself here seems to me too sophisticated for the much more normally boyish, albeit bookish, young Shade depicted in the second half of Canto One.
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