Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] MR on meter in Shade variant
From:
Rsgwynn1@cs.com
Date:
Thu, 8 Feb 2007 23:05:46 EST
To:
NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu


It seems obvious to me that Kinbote has erred (English prosody is not his forte, after all) in assuming that only a trochee would fit here.  A spondee would do as well.  Thus, assuming Shade didn't mean "Kinbote," poor "Kit Smart" (whose affinity to cats is well known, as is his madness) would be the obvious choice here, perhaps omitted (as an "N-joke") because he's already been indirectly alluded to in the book's epigraph (from Boswell). "Baudelaire" for Nabokov is obviously a two-syllable word, not an anapest, as Kinbote correctly notes.

Pope occasionally packs several consecutive stressed syllables into an I5 line: "When Ajax STRIVES SOME ROCK'S VAST WEIGHT to THROW."  Shade would know this, but perhaps rejected the line because he exceeds Pope's five consecutive stresses by stacking up nine, possibly even ten monosyllables (if we pronounce "Baudelaire" in the French manner, giving equal stress to both syllables) in one line.  Pope says this is in error:

And ten dull words oft creep in one dull line.

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