Subject
Explanation II (Pain/Pane; Loam/Decay)
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Dear List,
On May 22 I wrote: "The sun attains/ Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes" Isn't this reference to "windowpane" on lines 985/86 suggestive that PF's line 1000 would not close with a similar "windowpane"????????? Shade could be as mad as you will...but he wouldn't allow this to happen, or would he? "
thereby giving the impression that line 1000 wouldn't close with a kinbotean return to a self-referencial first line, but with the second verse.
How very unfortunate.I simply meant that there'd be a "windowpane" hovering around, as a phantasmatic ringing in our ears, should the line "I was the shadow of ..." be used for the third time in PF's closing verse. In fact, I agree with those who maintain that Shade's missing last line is impossible to fill in, should it have been left open by accident or on purpose. The hovering word that would be called in, in my apprehension, to rhyme with "lane," is "pain." (slain/pane/lane/pain)*
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* Cf. lines 139-145: "A thread of subtle pain,/ Tugged at by playful death, released again,/ But always present, ran through me. One day,/..../ A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy" ..."There was a sudden sunburst in my head." ... Soon Shade will add: "During one winter every afternoon/ I'd sink into that momentary swoon."
A long stretch of verses later, he'll inset on lines 526/7: "The melancholy and the tenderness/ Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;"...and on 544/45: "Your spirit stripped and utterly alone,/Your task unfinished, your despair unknown,"
A search about Balthazar, prince of Loam (Kinbote, note 62), carried me to mortal clay in T.S.Eliot's seasonal second quartet, East Coker. Note the falling light, a passing van, the "you" leaning against..., a deep lane, the electric heat and haze, and the motto "in my beginning is my end." Peasants in their wedding dance have feet of "loam," and they form the cycle of earthly decay and rebirth.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light...
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