Jerry Friedman [to
JM's "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?]
I doubt it. The "case" would have lasted from the previous year, which I
think is possible.
JM: There are two notes ( to
lines 181-182 with the birthday July-cicada singing, and to line
238) where Kinbote employs a curious "present tense," in both
cases. In the first one, he
emphasizes the closeness of Shade's "waxwing/cicada,": "The bird of lines 1-4 and
131 is again with us. It will reappear in the ultimate line of the poem; and
another cicada, leaving its envelope behind, will sing triumphantly at
lines 236-244." For line 238, he'll
describe the envelope left on a tree trunk by an adult cicada and, while he
mentions Lafontaine he adds: "The
cigale’s companion piece, the ant,
is about to be embalmed in
amber."
From Kinbote's point of view, the cicada (in
238) has just emerged, inspite of the sleety March
day and, somehow, it also sings!
Okay, I see. The cicada is probably dead, so Shade's "alive the song" was probably not true even when he saw the molted integument. Thanks! I hadn't noticed that.
However, when animals are used as images of survival after death (snakes shedding their skin, butterfly metamorphosis), the animal's eventual death usually isn't taken as weakening the image. Both the ant and the cicada's shell are stuck to the tree; the ant died there and the cicada flew away and sang (for a while). There might be some enjoyable irony in the fact that the cicada is just as dead as the ant now.
For more literalism, only the male cicadas sing, so there's at least a 50 percent chance that the cicada that left its shell on the tree never sang anyway (assuming cicadas have equal numbers of males and females).
Kinbote's present tense strikes (there's an example) me as normal in talking about literature. If I can see any importance in it, it's that he could be revitalizing the moribund trope of the poet immortalizing his subject. Not only did the cicada sing after molting, it's still alive and singing in Shade's poem in some sense. Maybe.
The Wikiparticle has a primitive but evocative photographic animation of a
Tibicen cicada (the most common genus in North America) molting and flying away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicadidae
...