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...