ln 507: "Wrote President McAber"
"macabre": "having death as a subject: comprising or including a personalized representation of death"

Also perhaps the character Wilkins Micawber from Dickens' _David Copperfield_, who is certain that "something will turn up" to save him from his financial difficulties, and who flirts with suicide. Also the word "aber" in McAber is German for "but" (just saying is all).

ln 531-532: "the trail of silver slime / Snails leave or flagstones": a misprint? Is this different in other editions?

ln 596: see 231 for K's variant including "Tanagra dusk"

ln 601-: "We'll think of matters only known to us-" etc: has a resonance of Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress". Marvell is mentioned on line 678.

Maybe also Eliot's "A Game of Chess" from the Waste Land (see below): "'What shall we ever do?'"

ln 609-614: see 234 for K's variant

ln 627-630: K chooses these lines in particular to be replaced by the Tanagra dusk variant (p. 231)

ln 627: "Starover Blue": see ln 189: "College astronomer Starover Blue"

ln 629: see 237 for variant

ln 651: "In the dark garden by the shagbark tree." see ln 990

ln 656-661: "I hate that wind! Let's play some chess.' 'All right.'" etc: a parody of Eliot's "A Game of Chess", part II of "The Waste Land":

"What is that noise?"
       The wind under the door.
"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"
       Nothing again nothing.
            "Do
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?"


      I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"
            But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag--
It's so elegant
So intelligent
"What shall I do now? What shall I do?"
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street "With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
"What shall we ever do?"
     The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

The wind is howling while the characters talk -- mirror images and love eroded. These characters are NOT Shade and Sybil!

ln 662-664: "Who rides so late in the night and the wind?" etc. "Pale Fire" is interpolated here with Goethe's Der Erlkönig (1782). Especially given the previous several verses, one is compelled to put quotes around the quoted lines and continue the Waste Land-ish conversation, or perhaps start a new one between Shade and Goethe (or with Goethe's poem anyway):

G: "Who rides so late in the night and the wind?" (ln 1) S: It is the writer's grief. It is the wild March wind. G: "It is the father with his child." (ln 2)

The boy in Goethe's poem is transposed into a girl (Male->Lass in word golf, as with K's gender switching in the Timon quote (pg 80) and elsewhere).

That Goethe is quoted so earnestly while Eliot is parodied, I think says something about Shade's opinion about both of these authors.

ln 671-672: "The Untamed Seahorse": see Browning's "My Last Duchess": "Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse"

ln 680: "Lolita swept from Florida to Maine": summer and autumn of 1958 when the bestseller lists included Lolita.

ln 682: "Lang made your portrait. And one night I died": Boyd notes that VN admired the "incomparably beautiful" drawings of butterflies by a person named Lang (_Speak Memory_, 122).

ln 690: "Stood up and pointed with his pipe at me": as at VN's father in Germany, aiming for another. Shade's death parallels that of VN senior's. See also line 732-734.

ln 691-693: "And then it happened -- the attack, the trance": compare to Shade's fits from ln 140

ln 704-705: "A system of cells interlinked within / Cells interlinked within cells interlinked": another spiral, here surrounding the fountain...

ln 707: "Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.": See the note on Poe's Pym. See also line 758. In King Alfred's "Boethius", a fountain represents the promise of life.

Oh! truly blessed     a man would be
Here in all things,     had he the power to see
The bright and spotless     heavenly stream,
That grand fountain     of every good;
And if from himself     he might hurl away
The swart mist,     his spirit's darkness.

ln 707: "Against the dark, a tall white fountain played."
Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837) is his only novel and, according to Borges, his greatest work. It concerns in part a voyage to the South Pole, the discovery of a strange land where the rocks of a chasm are the shapes of words hinting at arcane mysteries (patterns of nature leading to higher truths), and ending at another, solely white land where a giant white cataract falls from the sky and pours into a milky sea. This fountain from the sky offers only a dead ending instead of the revelation and salvation hoped for by the crew: Pym's journal ends as the ship enters the cataract and they meet "a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men"; but also symbolizes creative imagination and the source of all art, especially the white paper of literary art.

Pym's journal is followed by a "Note", which forms a brief commentary on the text, and reveals the entire thing to be a hoax: according to the editor of the "Note", the words engraved in the chasm of the strange land "constitute an Ethiopian verbal root–-the root ... 'To be shady'" (Poe, 244). Shady indeed, for as Daniel Wells comments, "when we assemble a map of the entire chasm from Pym's own diagrams, the secret of [the island] reveals itself" to be Poe's own name (in mirror form naturally). "This communication is between Poe and his special readership," writes Wells, "who must connect the figures in written script before the meaning emerges. One must glimpse the total picture from a perspective outside and above the action, something which the characters within the Narrative and its 'Editor' fail to do. When the connection is made, and it glares at us in its stark simplicity, the aesthetic distance between author and work disappears; Poe signs his name, as it were, to his island, and the fiction of the separate existences of Pym and Peters (and the 'Editor') collapses like the landscape itself in the previous episode." (Wells, Engraved Within the Hills, Poe Studies_, vol X, no. 1, 1977).

Poe's Alone (1830) has some similarities to Shade's poem, especially Cantos One and Three, and includes both a fountain and a mountain:

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then–in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life–was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Poe's To One in Paradise (1834) has a fountain and a Dim Gulf:

Thou wast all that to me, love,
For which my soul did pine-
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
"On! on!"–but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! me
The light of Life is o'er!
"No more–no more–no more-"
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams-
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.


This poem is included in Poe's story The Assignation (1834), which concerns in part a drowned child with a beautiful mother:

"A child, slipping from the arms of its own mother, had fallen from an upper window of the lofty structure into the deep and dim canal. The quiet waters had closed placidly over their victim; and, although my own gondola was the only one in sight, many a stout swimmer, already in the stream, was seeking in vain upon the surface, the treasure which was to be found, alas! only within the abyss. Upon the broad black marble flagstones at the entrance of the palace, and a few steps above the water, stood a figure which none who then saw can have ever since forgotten. It was the Marchesa Aphrodite --the adoration of all Venice --the gayest of the gay --the most lovely where all were beautiful --but still the young wife of the old and intriguing Mentoni, and the mother of that fair child, her first and only one, who now deep beneath the murky water, was thinking in bitterness of heart upon her sweet caresses, and exhausting its little life in struggles to call upon her name."

"'The Visionary' (Godey's Lady's Book, January 1834; revised as 'The Assignation,' Broadway Journal , 7 June 1845) was Poe's first story to appear in a national monthly with a wide circulation. As one of the Folio Club tales it had been assigned to 'Mr. Convolvulus Gondola, a young gentleman who had travelled a good deal.' Due, in part, to its inflated bathos, it has been regarded as a lampoon of Byronic passion or as a parody of Thomas More. Neither of those views reckons with Poe's preference for the visionary hero, the classical, Hellenic heroine, the conventional villain, the symbolic rescue, the arabesque apartment, the love poem written in London, the painting of the Marchesa Aphrodite, or the final suicide pact. W. H. Auden's comment on Poe's style as 'operatic' suggests that these stock elements, coupled with the overwrought diction, may, within the narrator's maturing perception, comprise a psychodrama of the self's quest for origins, for identity, and for unity. So considered, it has been read as a paradigm of Poe's own search for a lost unity of the primal self." (Carlson, Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 74, 1988)

ln 739: "The quiddity": "The inherent nature or essence of a person or thing; that which constitutes a person or thing" (OED). Makes me think of Joyce of course.

ln 767: "Jim Coates": Perhaps the father in the movie _Old Yeller_ (1957), who has the line, "Now and then, for no good reason, life will haul off and knock a man flat."

Probably not the intention, but this is another baseball player, debuted in 1956 and played mainly for the Yankees.

ln 782-784: "Blue", "Mon Blon", "Matterhorn": all mountains, forecasting ln 801: "Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch"

ln 806-815: "But all at once it dawned on me that this / Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme:" etc.

If one buys the Shadean theory, this verse may be the moment of Kinbote's creation, the "contrapuntal theme" indicating the Shade-Kinbote Poem-Commentary fugue. "Just this: not text but texture": the feel instead of the fact, the way life feels, its palpable reality, and the patterns in it, the web of sense, plexed artistry. Shade creates the texture that allows him to gesture beyond life by creating a web with strands stuck partly to the poem and partly to the Commentary.

"Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns" (ln 819-820): From the chessboard universe to the fairy tale -- multiple wor[l]ds -- an infinite progress of patterns pointing to infinity: patterns in seasons (Shade dies in summer, poem begins in winter), physical universes to atoms, patterns within patterns and so on, infinite varieties of life and art and nature, promise of continuation beyond death. The book mimics these infinite patterns and attempts to show how they may be interpreted.