And if anyone was curious, my aim was to put together the Nabokvian
with another take on that Timon passage that includes a references to
the next, less-quoted lines:
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:

 

I'm talking about Stanza VII of Wallace Stevens' The Man with the Blue Guitar:

 

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

 

When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

 

The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,

 

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

 

I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,

 

Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand

 

Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

 

--Tim Henderson