In a message dated 01/12/2006 20:21:44 GMT Standard Time, jansy@AETERN.US
writes:
My copy ( Vintage, 1966) carries
different lines:
"Through
the window of that index
Climbs a
rose
And
sometimes a gentle wind ex
Ponto
blows."
In that one "I suppose"
became "a rose" and unheedful readers are the "vulgar", not the
"discerning ones" ( as we find in the lines that come before
it.)
Does CHW know why his verses are
different, which were written before, what is the corrected
version?
No, 'fraid not. My Penguin, 1966, has the version you cite. The other
I picked up somewhere else, either from past postings, or from the internet. I
failed, vulgar and unheedful, to check my Penguin SM.
CHW: You didn't
answer my comment about your sentence: Basic premise: Accept
that both halves of PF emanate entirely from the inventive mind of Botkin...
I
asked you why you only saw two parts ( Poem and Commentary) as comprising
"Pale Fire", not the Index, not the
Foreword.
Well, two "halves" was only the roughest of descriptions. Are you saying
that the Index and/or Foreword are by someone other than either JS or CK? Does
PF consist of halves, thirds or quarters? Or none of these? State the
alternative preferred.
From Dr.Johnson's "Notes to Shakespeare": Henry IV,
Part I; 3.1.96
(On "moiety".) Hotspur is here just such
a divider as the Irishman who made three halves: Therefore,
for the honour of Shakespeare, I will suppose, with the Oxford
Editor, that he wrote portion. --- WARBURTON.
I will not suppose it. --- JOHNSON
After passing a certain age, I find almost everything I read reminds me of
something else, just as every new face I meet reminds me of a face from the
past. Apologies. VN's elevation of the footnote into a literary art-form in its
own right was foreshadowed by Johnson. I suppose.
Charles