JM: “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his
soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye! and what then?" ( "Anima Poetę : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (1895) edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 282)
Jorge Luiz Borges referred to Coleridge's paradisical flower in "Otras Inquisiciones" (1952), in an article that deserves attention from Nabokovian readers for various reasons, soon to be presented in another posting. Today I simply want
to link Coleridge's note about dream and "reality", to two possible allusions to it by VN. The first one, in "Pale Fire," presents a possibly wide-awake Shade with a brown shoe lying in the lawn.
MR: Very interesting find, Jansy! I immediately heard in the “If… And if” rhetorical pattern these lines, also by Shade:
If on some names island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a new skin, that island is no myth. (759-762)
Matt