Stan K-Bootle:Gary: sorry to mix up my iambics and anapests! Was I confused by Browning’s regular use of both? My main point remains: a tentative link between VN’s Exe-to-Wye trip and a popular Browning poem surely familiar to the author of Pale Fire. ..others may well enjoy noting that six-line stanzas, death, frost, snow and HAZE occur in both works.

JM:  I couldn’t remember if Nabokov had ever set down “blast the paraphrast” or “ a pest on his anapest.”  I checked and only the second option seems to be valid.

Here it is (extracted from ADA), emphatically present. There’s even a “Z” (related to chromosomes, to XX and XY?):

“he somehow missed the sound of her high heels on the stairs (or did not distinguish them from his heartbeats) while he was in the middle of his twentieth trudge’ back to the ardors and arbors! Eros qui prend son essor! Arts that our marblery harbors: Eros, the rose and the sore,’ I am ill at these numbers, but e’en rhymery is easier ‘than confuting the past in mute prose.’ Who wrote that? Voltimand or Voltemand? Or the Burning Swine? A pest on his anapest! ‘All our old loves are corpses or wives.’ All our sorrows are virgins or whores. A black bear with bright russet locks (the sun had reached its first parlor window) stood awaiting him. Yes — the Z gene had won, she was slim and strange. Her green eyes had grown...”