I've been enjoying and learning a lot from the discussion of reversed words and "skaters" and "retake".
I'm not enough of a scholar to read all of "The Pickerel Pond", but I did notice that the speaker of the poem calls himself "perverse". Of course Wilson had the etymological meaning in mind, but this word could be applied to both Hazel and Kinbote (and "perverted" is conspicuously missing from descriptions of Kinbote). "Verse", "versipel", "reverse", and "universe" are important words in the poem, and Kinbote says "transverse" and "traverse" a lot. Possibly the reader, or Wilson, is supposed to see twisting words as a sign of perversity, using that specific word.
Since frost and Zembla have been mentioned together, maybe I can remind people of Pope's lines
So Zembla's Rocks (the beauteous Work of Frost)
Rise white in Air, and glitter o'er the Coast;
Kiran Krishna quoted them in a post in 2000, along with the mention of Zembla in "The Dunciad".
http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0007&L=nabokv-l&D=0&O=D&P=788
On the subject of Hazel's death, I've been puzzled why Shade can't see his house from the lake any more. Though no tree has intervened, has Hazel? By blurring his vision with tears (which you'd think he'd understand), or in some less obvious way?
I agree with Brian Boyd that Hazel seems to have drowned in Lake Omega, which Exton is on the south shore of (n. 490), but the other lakes conjoined with it, Ozero and Zero, have equally appropriate names. As Kinbote escaped off the board to file i, Hazel stepped off to rank 0.
(It's odd that New Wye is to the north, but the three lakes are to the south, and Shade took Lake Road to school. Did the college town of New Wye not have a high school, so its residents had to go to school somewhere else, such as Exton, on the south side of Lake Omega? And if so, how did he get to the other side of the lake?)
(Also by the way, one source of "Lochanhead" is presumably Angus MacDiarmid's "Lochearnhead".)
Jansy asked how the weather at Hazel's death agrees with the description in lines 483-487 of the police car coming to the Shades' house. There are only patches of snow because of the thaw, and though possibly the wind wouldn't affect the police car's headlights illuminating the cedar trunks, possibly flying leaves and swaying branches of shrubs would create a flicker, which I think is consistent with "festive blaze".
A few technical points:
Stan asked whether there was a Greek word for an iambic substitution in an anapestic line. For limericks and "How they Brought the Good News...", "acephalous" might work--an acephalous line is missing an initial unstressed syllable.
I think just about any English speaker would have the same reaction to VN's "fourth paeon" poem that Wilson did in the next letter: it's iambic. Karlinsky's edition of the N-W letters is at limited preview at Google Books
http://books.google.com/books?id=AstRuYyehzgC&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q=&f=false
where you can see both letters, including VN's Russian verse in paeons.
Though Wilson might have gone a /little/ too far--how would he handle Hopkins's "Felix Randal" without paeons?--in my limited experience "amphibrach" is seldom used in English scansion. (I know it mostly from Coleridge's poem on the metrical feet--see <http://www.poeticbyway.com/xcolerid.htm>.) I think most critics would scan "Exile" as acephalous anapests rather than catalectic amphibrachs.
Carolyn Kunin asked whether cedars are firs. In American English, "cedar" usually means "juniper", definitely not firs, which have cones. Cedar waxwings like "cedar" berries. This is discussed further in Brian Boyd's book on /Pale Fire/, and I said many of the same things in a post in 1998.
Jerry Friedman
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