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Re: Coleridge and Pale Fire
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Wiiliam Dane wrote: This fountain [Coleridge], with its single tree that seems to echo Shade’s shagbark (“I had a favorite young shagbark there/ With ample dark jade leaves…” (ll. 49-50)), is a sort of final, paradisiacal resting-spot. (In a generally pastoral way it also echoes Ada’s, and Titania’s, bowers.)...The many biographical connections between Coleridge and Kinbote have been commented on previously, as have those between "Kubla Khan" and Pale Fire. I think Sybilline Leaves is also worth a look.
I think that in the case of Nabokov the entire associative background should, often, but not always, be considered more as a hidden music than some kind of definite literary reference or as a planted clue. For example, the idea of a white fountain blends in with a fabulist Lafontaine( Canto 2) or, later, Shade's confession that "I love great mountains. From the iron gate/Of the ramshackle house we rented there/ One saw a snowy form, so fair,/ That one could only fetch a sigh, as if"... ( mountains and lots of "F" in Canto Three...)
WD's connection with other works of Coleridge is very enriching and we might to return to it following this poet's philosophy and Leibniz "monads" and pantheism (about which I first read about in Jorge L. Borges' own lectures ).
Gerard Manley Hopkins has been quoted by VN only once (or so I think) in "Lolita", but his dappled instresses can also be felt a long way, but now I remember particularly "Spelt from Sybil's leaves" and a delicate midsummer nightscape when "the moon dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a fingernail held to the candle or paring or paradisical fruit" ... A similar image of the moon is to be found somehwere in PF, but not close to the poet's own fingernail parings...
Sybilline Leaves bring out the mithological reference that speaks of reading the future from leaves, if not "scribbled
in the dark" on the bark of a tree...It seems to me that "Pale Fire" grows with every reading of it and mingles with our living experience of other poets, new information and other landscapes...
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I think that in the case of Nabokov the entire associative background should, often, but not always, be considered more as a hidden music than some kind of definite literary reference or as a planted clue. For example, the idea of a white fountain blends in with a fabulist Lafontaine( Canto 2) or, later, Shade's confession that "I love great mountains. From the iron gate/Of the ramshackle house we rented there/ One saw a snowy form, so fair,/ That one could only fetch a sigh, as if"... ( mountains and lots of "F" in Canto Three...)
WD's connection with other works of Coleridge is very enriching and we might to return to it following this poet's philosophy and Leibniz "monads" and pantheism (about which I first read about in Jorge L. Borges' own lectures ).
Gerard Manley Hopkins has been quoted by VN only once (or so I think) in "Lolita", but his dappled instresses can also be felt a long way, but now I remember particularly "Spelt from Sybil's leaves" and a delicate midsummer nightscape when "the moon dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a fingernail held to the candle or paring or paradisical fruit" ... A similar image of the moon is to be found somehwere in PF, but not close to the poet's own fingernail parings...
Sybilline Leaves bring out the mithological reference that speaks of reading the future from leaves, if not "scribbled
in the dark" on the bark of a tree...It seems to me that "Pale Fire" grows with every reading of it and mingles with our living experience of other poets, new information and other landscapes...
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm