Matthew Roth: Just a trifle I
ran across while reading about the last days of Swift in Craik's "The Life of
Jonathan Swift" (1894):"Looking at himself in the glass, he
was said to have exclaimed in pity, 'Poor old man!'." I wonder if this
provides the origin of Shade's variant line, "Poor old man Swift, poor --,
poor Baudelaire." In which case, was John Shade also looking in the glass when
he wrote that line?
JM: Kinbote suggests his
name to fill in the blank ( poor mad Kinbote). The poet, himself, was paring his fingernails. We know that
he used a mirror while he shaved in the bath-tub ( or was it only
VN?).
Your information about Swift's exclamation,
and its link to the variant, is wonderful!
While I re-read the lines in question, and I
don't know if any entomologist has already called attention to it (should
it be an incongruent detail, I mean), I was struck by the reference to
singing cicadas. I understand that, in
the US, cicadas come out in July. I'd always thought that the squat and
frog-eyed emerald case (line 238) had been a cicada's but the
empty hulk was found in cold March, on the day Hazel died. This suggested
to me that this insect had recently emerged from it: is it
possible?
The clogged ant, as the companion piece to
the emerald case, reinforces the allusion to a cicada by a reference to La
Fontaine (although it is the cicada that is alive, not the
ant).
In the meantime, I enjoyed again the
elegant way Shade, in a few lines, mentions his birthday, Sybil's
pregnancy (Hazel is also "in a case," in Nice) and announces her
death, while discussing after-life.