Matt Roth: In our article on PF,
Tiffany & I relate the Ginkgo poem to Goethe's. In this context, your Gradus
note (tree=3) is quite helpful. Shade is two (himself and Kinbote) and Gradus
makes tree. Thanks for the insight!
JM: One has to return to
analogies and puns over and over to be able to dislodge them from a
set meaning. Very nice wording ("...and Gradus makes tree").
Although Kinbote was careful
to reveal the proximity between Grados* and Gradus, the other
step ("tree/three") is not one everybody dares to
make. K's note almost authorizes
the gradation from botany into a downgraded "Sacred
Trinity..." Like Kinbote,
Hazel toyed with words (spider/redip, pot/top), but there is a clumsy one,
"a didactic katydid," which
always puzzles me. Swift 's poem
"Cadenus and Vanessa" plays with his academic status (Cadenus is an anagram of
Decanus, ie, Dean). I wonder if "didactic katydid" could refer to "cadenus
decanus," thereby subreptitiously bringing in Swift's old
age madness?
* CK to Line 49 (shagbark)
"... Our poet shared with the English
masters the noble knack of transplanting trees into verse with their sap and
shade...bulldozers spared an
arc of those sacred trees planted by a landscaper of genius (Repburg) at the end
of the so-called Shakespeare Avenue...I do not know if it is relevant or not but
there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line, and "tree" in Zemblan is grados."