Subject
Parody in PF? The bathetic Shade
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Why shouldn't Shade like bathos? /The/ eminent New England
poet, Frost, did:
"No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little--less--nothing!--and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."
(from "Out, Out--")
"I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.
"Yet all the precedent is on my side:..."
(from "The Onset")
Shade indulges in lower comedy here than anything I can
think of in Frost (I missed the hemorrhoids, so thanks,
and don't forget Professor McAber, the brother of Pogo's
vulture Sarcophagus MacAbre), but it still seems
verisimilar to me, and of a piece with Shade's shaving.
I can't figure out and haven't read of any way to tell,
in the parodic places, whether Shade is writing parody or
Nabokov is.
Jerry Friedman
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poet, Frost, did:
"No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little--less--nothing!--and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."
(from "Out, Out--")
"I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.
"Yet all the precedent is on my side:..."
(from "The Onset")
Shade indulges in lower comedy here than anything I can
think of in Frost (I missed the hemorrhoids, so thanks,
and don't forget Professor McAber, the brother of Pogo's
vulture Sarcophagus MacAbre), but it still seems
verisimilar to me, and of a piece with Shade's shaving.
I can't figure out and haven't read of any way to tell,
in the parodic places, whether Shade is writing parody or
Nabokov is.
Jerry Friedman
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