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One more note on Rote. While it is of course possible that VN simply
happened upon the sea-sound definition in his dictionary, this doesn't
seem
to fit with all the rest of Shade's book titles, each of them definite
allusions to the work of others. But somehow in my many searches I
missed
this:
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
This is Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," from the Four Quartets (the poem
Hazel
was reading in Canto 2) and it's clear that Eliot is using rote here to
evoke the sound of the sea. I have no idea how this might connect to the
rest of PF, but it surely must be the most likely literary source for
VN's
use of the word. I wish I better understood VN's feelings about Eliot;
he is
openly hostile towards him, but he draws on Eliot's work in significant
ways. Odd.
Matt Roth