872: "The right word flutes and perches on my hand": like a butterfly...?

877: "And caught up with myself -- upon the lawn": see ln 10 -- have we come full circle?

879: "And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe": an echo of Lolita?

895: see 269 for variant

923: see variant 270

923: "speak of evil as none has" etc: hyperbole of the mundane

940-1: "Man's life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem. Note for further use.": Shadean - shade knows all. "Further use" indicates the Commentary

957: "Dim Gulf": from Poe's "To One Who is in Paradise"

It's interesting that we've shifted from a focus on Hazel's death to a focus (in absentia granted) on Shade's death. Surely the two are connected, and the strongest link is the butterfly.

Boyd has the Dark Vanessa, which is linked to Sybil (see ln 270), as Hazel's spirit warning Shade of his impending death. Before reading his _Magic of Artistic Discovery_, my belief was that it was a simple correlation between the Butterfly of Doom warning of death and Sybil warning of Kinbote, but Boyd takes it much further. Let's see if I can avoid screwing this up (he does a great dissection in the book, too long to quote):

In lines 316-319 we have the reversed Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale where Hazel doesn't transform into the wood duck (rather than the swan, remember?), and is linked to the Toothwort White, a morose, dingy butterfly often mistaken for others. She *ought* to have transformed, given the way the fairy tale goes, into the kind of beauty connected with her mother, the Vanessa Atalanta, the "exuberant" "magnificent" Red Admirable. So it is only after death that she *is* transformed. The important scene in the Haunted Barn plays into this, and I'll point it out when we get there. Note that Hazel enters the poem in Canto 2 for the first time as a ghost (ln 290), and is only referred to earlier in connection with the "phantom" of Shade's daughter's swing.