In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his dead daughter (whose name he never mentions) and says:
I think she always nursed a small mad hope. (Line 383)
Die Hoffnung ("The Hope," 1900) is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (an Austrian poet, 1875-1926):
Stille Stunden gibt's, da ranken
leicht sich um des Lebens Baum
Wünsche, Hoffnungen, Gedanken,
Bild um Bild und Traum um Traum.
Stunden gibt's, wo Stürme wüten
um den Stamm gar wild entfacht,
dass der Hoffnung junge Blüten
sterben müssen über Nacht.
Aber bald schon, morgen ranken
um den kahlen Lebensbaum
Wünsche, Hoffnungen, Gedanken,
Bild um Bild sich Traum um Traum.
There are quiet hours when
gently twine around the tree of life
wishes, hopes, thoughts,
image after image and dream after dream.
There are hours when storms rage
wildly kindled around the trunk,
so that hope’s young blossoms
must die overnight.
But soon already, tomorrow will twine
around the bare tree of life
wishes, hopes, thoughts,
image after image, dream after dream.
At the end of The Tenth Elegy (Duineser Elegien, 1923) R. M. Rilke mentions die Kätzchen der leeren Hasel (the hazel’s empty catkins):
Einsam steigt er dahin, in die Berge des Ur-Leids.
Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los.
Aber erweckten sie uns, die unendlich Toten, ein Gleichnis,
siehe, sie zeigten vielleicht auf die Kätzchen der leeren
Hasel, die hängenden, oder
meinten den Regen, der fällt auf dunkles Erdreich im Frühjahr. —
Und wir, die an steigendes Glück
denken, empfänden die Rührung,
die uns beinah bestürzt,
wenn ein Glückliches fällt.
Alone he climbs, till lost to sight, in the mountains.
Out of the blankness of fate his steps return no sound.
But if they wished to waken a likeness in us, the endlessly dead,
perhaps they would point to the hazel’s empty catkins
that hang in the dry wind; or else the rain
that moistens earth’s dark soil in the early year.
And we, who think of happiness ascending,
would with consternation
know the rapture that almost overwhelms us,
when happiness falls.
(tr. John Waterfield)
The hazel’s empty catkins bring to mind Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter whose "real" name seems to be Nadezhda Botkin). Nadezhda means in Russian "hope." Earlier in his elegy, Rilke mentions the clear shape of an “M” in the sky that stands for the Mothers:
Und höher, die Sterne. Neue. Die Sterne des Leidlands.
Langsam nennt sie die Klage: — Hier,
siehe: den Reiter, den Stab, und das vollere Sternbild
nennen sie: Fruchtkranz. Dann, weiter, dem Pol zu:
Wiege; Weg; Des Brennende Buch; Puppe; Fenster.
Aber im südlichen Himmel, rein wie im Innern
einer gesegneten Hand, das klar erglänzende ›M‹,
das die Mütter bedeutet … —
And higher, above them, the stars. New ones. The stars
of the Land of Pain. Slowly she names them. – Here,
look: this is the Rider, this the Staff, and that fuller
constellation they call the Fruited Garland.
Then, towards the pole, the Cradle, the Path, the Window,
the Burning Book, the Doll; and in the southern sky
shining as if on a hand upheld in blessing
the clear shape of an “M”, that stands for the Mothers...
In Canto One of his poem, Shade describes Aunt Maud's room and mentions the verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral):
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
Describing the poltergeist phenomena in Shade's house, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a Bible-like Webster open at M standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow:
It appears that in the beginning of 1950, long before the barn incident (see note to line 347), sixteen-year-old Hazel was involved in some appalling "psychokinetic" manifestations that lasted for nearly a month. Initially, one gathers, the poltergeist meant to impregnate the disturbance with the identity of Aunt Maud who had just died; the first object to perform was the basket in which she had once kept her half-paralyzed Skye terrier (the breed called in our country "weeping-willow dog"). Sybil had had the animal destroyed soon after its mistress's hospitalization, incurring the wrath of Hazel who was beside herself with distress. One morning this basket shot out of the "intact" sanctuary (see lines 90-98) and traveled along the corridor past the open door of the study, where Shade was at work; he saw it whizz by and spill its humble contents: a ragged coverlet, a rubber bone, and a partly discolored cushion. Next day the scene of action switched to the dining room where one of Aunt Maud's oils (Cypress and Bat) was found to be turned toward the wall. Other incidents followed, such as short flights accomplished by her scrapbook (see note to line 90) and, of course, all kinds of knockings, especially in the sanctuary, which would rouse Hazel from her, no doubt, peaceful sleep in the adjacent bedroom. But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept a Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12).
I imagine, that during that period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off. My poor friend could not help recalling the dramatic fits of his early boyhood and wondering if this was not a new genetic variant of the same theme, preserved through procreation. Trying to hide from neighbors these horrible and humiliating phenomena was not the least of Shade's worries. He was terrified, and he was lacerated with pity. Although never able to corner her, that flabby, feeble, clumsy and solemn girl, who seemed more interested than frightened, he and Sybil never doubted that in some extraordinary way she was the agent of the disturbance which they saw as representing (I now quote Jane P.) "an outward extension or expulsion of insanity." They could not do much about it, partly because they disliked modern voodoo-psychiatry, but mainly because they were afraid of Hazel, and afraid to hurt her. They had however a secret interview with old-fashioned and learned Dr. Sutton, and this put them in better spirits. They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once the fiend was gone, as happens with the moskovett, that bitter blast, that colossus of cold air that blows on our eastern shores throughout March, and then one morning you hear the birds, and the flags hang flaccid, and the outlines of the world are again in place. The phenomena ceased completely and were, if not forgotten, at least never referred to; but how curious it is that we do not perceive a mysterious sign of equation between the Hercules springing forth from a neurotic child's weak frame and the boisterous ghost of Aunt Maud; how curious that our rationality feels satisfied when we plump for the first explanation, though, actually, the scientific and the supernatural, the miracle of the muscle and the miracle of the mind, are both inexplicable as are all the ways of Our Lord. (note to Line 230)
The miracle of the muscle and the miracle of the mind bring to mind Blumenmuskel (flower-muscle) in one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (1922):
Blumenmuskel, der der Anemone
Wiesenmorgen nach und nach erschließt,
bis in ihren Schooß das polyphone
Licht der lauten Himmel sich ergießt,
in den stillen Blütenstern gespannter
Muskel des unendlichen Empfangs,
manchmal so von Fülle übermannter,
daß der Ruhewink des Untergangs
kaum vermag die weitzurückgeschnellten
Blätterränder dir zurückzugeben:
du, Entschluß und Kraft von wieviel Welten!
Wir, Gewaltsamen, wir währen länger.
Aber wann, in welchem aller Leben,
sind wir endlich offen und Empfänger?
Flower-muscle that slowly opens back
the anemone to another meadow-dawn,
until her womb can feel the polyphonic
light of the sonorous heavens pouring down;
muscle of an infinite acceptance,
stretched within the silent blossom-star,
at times so overpowered with abundance
that sunset’s signal for response is bare-
ly able to return your too far hurled-
back petals for the darkness to revive:
you, strength and purpose of how many worlds!
We violent ones remain a little longer,
Ah but when, in which of all our lives,
shall we at last be open and receivers?
(tr. Stephen Mitchell)
The poet's wife, Sybil Shade makes one think of Rilke's sonnet Eine Sibylle ("A Sybil," 1907):
Einst, vor Zeiten, nannte man sie alt.
Doch sie blieb und kam dieselbe Strasse
täglich. Und man änderte die Masse,
und man zählte sie wie einen Wald
nach Jahrhunderten. Sie aber stand
jeden Abend auf derselben Stelle,
schwarz wie ein alte Citadelle
hoch und hohl und ausgebrannt;
von den Worten, die sich unbewacht
wider ihren Willen in ihr mehrten,
immerfort umschreien und umflogen,
während die schon wieder heimgekehrten
dunkel unter ihren Augenbogen
sassen, fertig für die Nacht.
Long before our time they called her old,
but she'd walk down the same road every day.
Her age became too much to say
in years — and, like a forest's, would be told
in centuries. She comes to stand at dusk —
her spot each time the same — and to foretell.
She is a hollow, wrinkled husk,
dark as a fire-gutted citadel.
She has to turn her flock of talking loose
or it will grow too crowded to relieve.
Flapping, screaming, words are flying all
around her. Then, returning home to roost,
they find a perch beneath her eyebrows' eaves
and in that shadow wait for night to fall.
(tr. L. Cottrell)
Sybil Shade and Queen Disa (Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, the wife of Charles the Beloved) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin. Rilke's mother, Phia Rilke (1851-1931) was born Sophie Entz. Ente is the German word for "duck." In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and says:
Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned
Into a wood duck. (ll. 318-319)
Shade reverses, so to speak, the metamorphosis in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Ugly Duckling (Den grimme ælling, 1843). In his commentary Kinbote writes:
A pretty conceit. The wood duck, a richly colored bird, emerald, amethyst, carnelian, with black and white markings, is incomparably more beautiful than the much-overrated swan, a serpentine goose with a dirty neck of yellowish plush and a frogman's black rubber flaps.
Incidentally, the popular nomenclature of American animals reflects the simple utilitarian minds of ignorant pioneers and has not yet acquired the patina of European faunal names. (note to Line 319)