…Nabok - Tartar Prince mentioned in Ada: for her sixteenth birthday Greg Erminin gives Ada "a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok" (1.39)….

 

JM: Nice to see the link between Nabok and Timur (ie: Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane). Shade’s lines about tyrants roaring in hell, or the apparent operatic understatement by Haendel in  “Tamerlano,” demand a similar attention to stylistic subtleties before we can reach the full horror of warring conquerors and their ever actual monstrosities.

Shade begins his poem as if under a sweet dreamlike trance (“The dead, the gentle dead – who knows? - / In tungsten filaments abide,/ And on my bedside table glows/ Another man’s departed bride…”) until forked lightning hits a livid plain… This is the necessary element of “surprise”- which T.S.Eliot considers  fundamental in real poetry, when he distinguishes “emotions considered to be poetic” and “the result of personal emotion in poetry” (Essay on Dryden).
Yellow ivory for a yellow camel isn’t anything that indicates something yellowed by age, and here my ignorance astounds me once again: is there a particular kind of “yellow ivory”? (I always considered ivory as a substitute for “whiteness.”)