In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his childhood and says that he was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816) is a sonnet by John Keats. The characters in Keats's King Stephen (1819), a Fragment of a Tragedy, include Queen Maud. Empress Matilda (1102–67), sometimes called Empress Maud, was Queen of England for a short time in 1141. Empress Maud is a drawing by William Blake. The next babe whose cry Aunt Maud lived to hear brings to mind a weeping Babe in William Blake's poem The Crystal Cabinet:
THE MAIDEN caught me in the wild,
Where I was dancing merrily;
She put me into her Cabinet,
And lock’d me up with a golden key.
This Cabinet is form’d of gold
And pearl and crystal shining bright,
And within it opens into a world
And a little lovely moony night.
Another England there I saw,
Another London with its Tower,
Another Thames and other hills,
And another pleasant Surrey bower,
Another Maiden like herself,
Translucent, lovely, shining clear,
Threefold each in the other clos’d—
O, what a pleasant trembling fear!
O, what a smile! a threefold smile
Fill’d me, that like a flame I burn’d;
I bent to kiss the lovely Maid,
And found a threefold kiss return’d.
I strove to seize the inmost form
With ardour fierce and hands of flame,
But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
And like a weeping Babe became—
A weeping Babe upon the wild,
And weeping Woman pale reclin’d,
And in the outward air again
I fill’d with woes the passing wind.
In his Commentary Kinbote remarks that at Aunt Maud's death Hazel Shade was not exactly a 'babe:"
Maud Shade, 1869-1950, Samuel Shade's sister. At her death, Hazel (born 1934) was not exactly a "babe" as implied in line 90. I found her paintings unpleasant but interesting. Aunt Maud was far from spinsterish, and the extravagant and sardonic turn of her mind must have shocked sometimes the genteel dames of New Wye. (note to ll. 86-90)
The lovely maid in William Blake's poem The Crystal Cabinet brings to mind the Canadian maid mentioned by Shade in the preceding lines of Canto One:
A preterist: one who collects cold nests.
Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests.
Here, tucked away by the Canadian maid,
I listened to the buzz downstairs and prayed
For everybody to be always well,
Uncles and aunts, the maid, her niece Adéle
Who'd seen the Pope, people in books, and God. (ll. 79-85)
Without any connection to the above: I notice that King Alfin (King of Zembla, father of Charles the Beloved, whose mild pure soul was netted by the angels) hints at the butterfly frosted elfin (Callophrys irus), a species of Lycaenidae that is native to North America.