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Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire -Berkley (1982).html
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Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire -Berkley (1982).html
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<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><span><img width="480" height="749" alt="image" src="Vladimir%20Nabokov%20-%20Pale%20Fire%20%20-Berkley%20%281982%29_files/Image_001.jpg" /></span></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s1" style="padding-top: 5pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">P<span class="s2">ALE </span>F<span class="s2">IRE</span></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s3" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">V<span class="s4">LADIMIR </span>N<span class="s4">ABOKOV</span></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><span><img width="416" height="685" alt="image" src="Vladimir%20Nabokov%20-%20Pale%20Fire%20%20-Berkley%20%281982%29_files/Image_002.png" /></span></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-top: 9pt;padding-left: 31pt;text-indent: 1pt;text-align: justify;">This Berkley book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading,
and was printed from new film.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">PALE FIRE</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with G. P Putnam's Sons</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 11pt;text-align: center;">PRINTING HISTORY</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 79pt;text-indent: 1pt;text-align: left;">G. P Putnam's edition published 1962 Berkley Medallion edition / June 1968</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 95pt;text-indent: -10pt;text-align: left;">Fifteenth printing / December 1982 Sixteenth printing / April 1984</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 11pt;text-align: center;">All rights reserved.</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">Copyright (c) 1962 by G. P Putnam's Sons.</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 11pt;text-align: center;">For information address:</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 115pt;text-indent: 4pt;text-align: left;">G. P Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue,</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 102pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">New York, New York 10016.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">ISBN: 0-425-06238-4</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">A BERKLEY BOOK (r) TM 757,375</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue,</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 11pt;text-align: center;">New York, New York 10016.</p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s5" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s6" style="padding-top: 5pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">T<span class="s7">O </span>V<span class="s7">ÉRA</span></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-top: 5pt;padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">“This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. "Sir, when I heard of him last, he
was running about town shooting cats." And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, "But Hodge shan't be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 75pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">J<span class="s8">AMES </span>B<span class="s8">OSWELL</span>, <i>the Life of Samuel Johnson</i></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s10" style="padding-top: 5pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">C<span class="s11">ONTENTS</span></p>
<p class="s12" style="padding-top: 45pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">Foreword</p>
<p class="s13" style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">1</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s12" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">Pale Fire</p>
<p class="s13" style="padding-left: 114pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">A P<span class="s14">OEM IN </span>F<span class="s14">OUR </span>C<span class="s14">ANTOS </span>15</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s12" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 16pt;text-align: center;">Commentary</p>
<p class="s13" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">50</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s12" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 16pt;text-align: center;">Index</p>
<p class="s13" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">285</p>
<h1 style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 99pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">F<span class="h2">OREWORD</span></h1>
<p class="s15" style="padding-top: 14pt;padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Pale Fire<span class="s16">, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis
Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of
eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of
his poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto.</span></p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and parhelia, occupies thirteen cards. Canto Two, your favorite, and that shocking tour de force, Canto
Three, are identical in length (334 lines) and cover twenty- seven cards each. Canto Four reverts to One in length and occupies again thirteen cards, of which the last four used on the day of his death give a Corrected Draft instead of a Fair
Copy.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: right;">A methodical man, John Shade usually copied out his daily quota of completed lines at midnight but even if he recopied them again later, as I suspect he sometimes did,
he marked his card or cards not with the date of his final adjustments, but with that of his Corrected Draft or first Fair Copy. I mean, he preserved the date of actual creation rather than that of second or third thoughts. There is a very loud
amusement park right in front of my present lodgings. We possess in result a complete calendar of his work.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">Canto One was begun in the small hours of July. 2 and completed on July 4. He started the next canto on his birthday and finished it on July 11. Another week was
devoted to Canto Three. Canto Four was begun on July 19, and as already noted, the last third of its text (lines 949-</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">999) is supplied by a Corrected Draft. This is extremely rough in appearance, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions, and does
not follow the lines of the card as rigidly as the Fair Copy does. Actually, it turns out to be beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface. It contains
not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading. This fact would be sufficient to show that the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview with one of our professed Shadeans - who affirmed <i>without having seen the manuscript of
the poem </i>that it "consists of disjointed drafts none of which yields a definite text" - is a malicious invention on the part of those who would wish not so much to deplore the state in which a great poet's work was interrupted
by death as to asperse the competence, and perhaps honesty, of its present editor and commentator.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Another pronouncement publicly made by Prof. Hurley and his clique refers to a structural matter. I quote from the same interview: "None can say how long John
Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly." Nonsense again! Aside from the veritable clarion of internal evidence ringing throughout
Canto Four, there exists Sybil Shade's affirmation (in a document dated July 25, 1959) that her husband "never intended to go beyond four parts." For him the third canto was the penultimate one, and thus I myself have heard him
speak of it, in the course of a sunset ramble, when, as if thinking aloud, he reviewed the day's work and gesticulated in pardonable self-approbation while his discreet companion kept trying in vain to adapt the swing of a long-limbed gait to
the disheveled old poet's jerky shuffle. Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have
completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical central</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music. Knowing Shade's
combinational turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth. And if all this were not enough - and it is, it is enough - I have had
the dramatic occasion of hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See my note to line 991.)</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">This batch of eighty cards was held by a rubber band which I now religiously put back after examining for the last time their precious contents. Another, much thinner,
set of a dozen cards, clipped together and enclosed in the same manila envelope as the main batch, bears some additional couplets running their brief and sometimes smudgy course among a chaos of first drafts. As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the
moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne
black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé. But he saved those twelve cards because of the unused felicities shining among the dross of used draftings. Perhaps, he vaguely expected to replace certain passages in the Fair Copy with some of the
lovely rejections in his files, or, more probably, a sneaking fondness for this or that vignette, suppressed out of architectonic considerations, or because it had annoyed Mrs. S., urged him to put off its disposal till the time when the marble
finality of an immaculate typescript would have confirmed it or made the most delightful variant seem cumbersome and impure. And perhaps, let me add in all modesty, he intended to ask my advice after reading his poem to me as I know he planned to
do.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">In my notes to the poem the reader will find these canceled readings. Their places are indicated, or at least suggested, by the draftings of established lines in their
</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">immediate neighborhood. In a sense, many of them are more valuable artistically and historically than some of the best passages in the final text. I
must now explain how <i>Pale Fire </i>came to be edited by me.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Immediately after my dear friend's death I prevailed on his distraught widow to forelay and defeat the commercial passions and academic intrigues that were bound
to come swirling around her husband's manuscript (transferred by me to a safe spot even before his body had reached the grave) by signing an agreement to the effect that he had turned over the manuscript to me; that I would have it published,
without delay, with my commentary by a firm of my choice; that all profits, except the publisher's percentage, would accrue to her; and that on publication day the manuscript would be handed over to the Library of Congress for permanent
preservation. I defy any serious critic to find this contract unfair. Nevertheless, it has been called (by Shade's former lawyer) "a fantastic farrago of evil," while another person (his former literary agent) has wondered with a
sneer if Mrs. Shade's tremulous signature might not have been penned "in some peculiar kind of red ink." Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one's attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming,
especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">As mentioned, I think, in my last note to the poem, the depth charge of Shade's death blasted such secrets and caused so many dead fish to float up, that I was
forced to leave New Wye soon after my last interview with the jailed killer. The writing of the commentary had to be postponed until I could find a new incognito in quieter surroundings, but practical matters concerning the poem had to be settled
at once. I took a plane to New York, had the manuscript photographed, came to terms with one of Shade's publishers, and was on the point of clinching the deal when, quite casually, in the midst of a vast sunset (we</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">sat in a cell of walnut and glass fifty stories above the progression of scarabs), my interlocutor observed: "You'll be happy to know, Dr.
Kinbote, that Professor So-and-so [one of the members of the Shade committee] has consented to act as our adviser in editing the stuff."</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Now "happy" is something extremely subjective. One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: <i>the lost glove is happy</i>. Promptly I refastened the catch of
my briefcase and betook myself to another publisher.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Imagine a soft, clumsy giant; imagine a historical personage whose knowledge of money is limited to the abstract billions of a national debt; imagine an exiled prince
who is unaware of the Golconda in his cuff links! This is to say - oh, hyperbolically - that I am the most impractical fellow in the world. Between such a person and an old fox in the book publishing business, relations are at first touchingly
carefree and chummy, with expansive banterings and all sorts of amiable tokens. I have no reason to suppose that anything will ever happen to prevent this initial relationship with good old Frank, my present publisher, from remaining a permanent
fixture.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Frank has acknowledged the safe return of the galleys I had been sent here and has asked me to mention in my Preface - and this I willingly do - that I alone am
responsible for any mistakes in my commentary. Insert before a professional. A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked the printed text of the poem against the phototype of the manuscript, and has found a few trivial misprints I had
missed; that has been all in the way of outside assistance. Needless to say how much I had been looking forward to Sybil Shade's providing me with abundant biographical data; unfortunately she left New Wye even before I did, and is dwelling
now with relatives in Quebec. We might have had, of course, a most fruitful correspondence, but the Shadeans were not to be shaken off. They headed for Canada in droves to pounce on the poor lady as soon as I had lost contact with her and her
changeful moods. Instead of answering a month-old letter</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: right;">from my cave in Cedarn, listing some of my most desperate queries, such as the real name of "Jim Coates" etc., she suddenly shot me a wire,
requesting me to accept Prof. H. (!) and Prof. C (!!) as co-editors of her husband's poem. How deeply this surprised and pained me! Naturally, it precluded collaboration with my friend's misguided widow. And he was a very dear friend
indeed! The calendar says I had known him only for a few months but there exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music. Never shall I forget how elated I
was upon learning, as mentioned in a note my reader shall find; that the suburban house (rented for my use from Judge Goldsworth who had gone on his Sabbatical to England) into which I moved on February 5, 1959, stood next to that of the
celebrated American poet whose verses I had tried to put into Zemblan two decades earlier! Apart from this glamorous neighborhood, the Goldsworthian château, as I was soon to discover, had little to recommend it. The heating system was a farce,
depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath. By occluding the apertures upstairs I
attempted to give more energy to the register in the living room but its climate proved to be incurably vitiated by there being nothing between it and the arctic regions save a sleezy front door without a vestige of vestibule - either because the
house had been built in midsummer by a naïve settler who could not imagine the kind of winter New Wye had in store for him, or because old-time gentility required that a chance caller at the open door could satisfy himself from the threshold that
nothing unseemly was going on in the</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">parlor.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">February and March in Zembla (the two last of the four "white-nosed months," as we call them) used to be pretty rough too, but even a peasant's room
there presented a solid of uniform warmth - not a reticulation of</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">deadly drafts. It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years - and this at the latitude of
Palermo. On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially (I was to learn later that they assumed I
wished to be left alone), were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice. John Shade busied himself clumsily
with a bucket from which, with the gestures of a sower, he distributed handfuls of brown sand over the blue glaze. He wore snowboots, his vicuña collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun. I knew he had been ill a few months
before, and thinking to offer my neighbors a ride to the campus in my powerful machine, I hurried out toward them. A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood separated it from my neighbors' driveway, and I was
about to cross that lane when I lost my footing and sat down on the surprisingly hard snow. My fall acted as a chemical reagent on the Shades' sedan, which forthwith budged and almost ran over me as it swung into the lane with John at the
wheel strenuously grimacing and Sybil fiercely talking to him. I am not sure either saw me.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented
credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a
remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to
the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had
already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questionsmere fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes
being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and
he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling
John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a
moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize
was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hufey, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all
his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is <i>that
</i>a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Despite a wobbly heart (see line 735), a slight limp, and a certain curious contortion in his method of progress, Shade had an inordinate liking for long walks, but
the snow bothered him, and he preferred, in winter, to have his wife call for him after classes with the car. A few days later, as I</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">was about to leave Parthenocissus Hall - or Main Hall (or now Shade Hall, alas), I saw him waiting outside for Mrs. Shade to fetch him. I stood beside
him for a minute, on the steps of the pillared porch, while pulling my gloves on, finger by finger, and looking away, as if waiting to review a regiment: "That was a thorough job," commented the poet. He consulted his wrist watch. A
snowflake settled upon it. "Crystal to crystal," said Shade. I offered to take him home in my powerful Kramler. "Wives, Mr. Shade, are forgetful." He cocked his shaggy head to look at the library clock. Across the bleak
expanse of snow-covered turf two radiant lads in colorful winter clothes passed, laughing and sliding. Shade glanced at his watch again and, with a shrug, accepted my offer.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">I wanted to know if he did not mind being taken the longer way, with a stop at Community Center where I wanted to buy some chocolate-coated cookies and a little
caviar. He said it was fine with him. From the inside of the supermarket, through a plate-glass window, I saw the old chap pop into a liquor store. When I returned with my purchases, he was back in the car, reading a tabloid newspaper which I had
thought no poet would deign to touch. A comfortable burp told me he had a flask of brandy concealed about his warmly coated person. As we turned into the driveway of his house, we saw Sybil pulling up in front of it. I got out with courteous
vivacity. She said: "Since my husband does not believe in introducing people, let us do it ourselves: You are Dr. Kinbote, aren't you? And.I am Sybil Shade." Then she addressed her husband saying he might have waited in his office
another minute: she had honked and called, and walked all the way up, et cetera. I turned to go, not wishing to listen to a marital scene, but she called me back: "Have a drink with us;" she said, "or rather with me, because John
is forbidden to touch alcohol." I explained I could not stay long as I was about to have a kind of little seminar at home followed by some table tennis, with two charming identical twins and another boy, another boy.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Henceforth I began seeing more and more of my celebrated neighbor. The view from one of my windows kept providing me with first-rate entertainment,
especially when I was on the wait for some tardy guest. From the second story of my house the Shades' living-room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the deciduous trees between us were still bare, and almost every
evening I could see the poet's slippered foot gently rocking. One inferred from it that he was sitting with a book in a low chair but one never managed to glimpse more than that foot and its shadow moving up and down to the secret rhythm of
mental absorption, in the concentrated lamplight. Always at the same time the brown morocco slipper would drop from the wool-socked foot which continued to oscillate, with, however, a slight slackening of pace. One knew that bedtime was closing
in with all its terrors; that in a few minutes the toe would prod and worry the slipper, and then disappear with it from my golden field of vision traversed by the black bendlet of a branch. And sometimes Sybil Shade would trip by with the
velocity and swinging arms of one flouncing out in a fit of temper, and would return a little later, at a much slower gait, having, as it were, pardoned her husband for his friendship with an eccentric neighbor; but the riddle of her behavior was
entirely solved one night when by dialing their number and watching their window at the same time I magically induced her to go through the hasty and quite innocent motions that had puzzled me.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Alas, my peace of mind was soon to be shattered. The thick venom of envy began squirting at me as soon as academic suburbia realized that John Shade valued my society
above that of all other people. Your snicker, my dear Mrs. C., did not escape our notice as I was helping the tired old poet to find his galoshes after that dreary get- together party at your house. One day I happened to enter the English
Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: "I guess Mr.
Shade has already left with the Great Beaver." Of course I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and after calmly taking the magazine
from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. There was also the morning when Dr. Nattochdag, head of the department to which I
was attached, begged the in a formal voice to be seated, then closed the door, and having regained, with a downcast frown, his swivel chair, urged me "to be more careful." In what sense, careful? A boy had complained to his adviser.
Complained of what, good Lord? That I had criticized a literature course he attended ("a ridiculous survey of ridiculous works, conducted by a ridiculous mediocrity"). Laughing in sheer relief, I embraced my good Netochka, telling him I
would never be naughty again. I take this opportunity to salute him. He always behaved with such exquisite courtesy toward me that I sometimes wondered if he did not suspect what Shade suspected, and what only three people (two trustees and the
president of the college) definitely knew.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 20pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Oh, there were many such incidents. In a skit performed by a group of drama students I was pictured as a pompous woman hater with a German accent, constantly quoting
Housman and nibbling raw carrots; and a week before Shade's death, a certain ferocious lady at whose club I had refused to speak on the subject of "The Hally Vally" (as she put it, confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a
Finnish epic), said to me in the middle of a grocery store, "You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you," and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: "What's more, you are
insane." But let me not pursue the tabulation of nonsense. Whatever was thought, whatever was said, I had my full</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">reward in John's friendship. This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not
alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart. His whole being constituted a mask. John Shade's physical appearance was so little in keeping with the harmonies hiving in the man, that one felt inclined
to dismiss it as a coarse disguise or passing fashion; for if the fashions of the Romantic Age subtilized a poet's manliness by baring his attractive neck, pruning his profile and reflecting a mountain lake in his oval gaze, present-day
bards, owing perhaps to better opportunities of aging, look like gorillas or vultures. My sublime neighbor's face had something about it that might have appealed to the eye, had it been only leonine or only Iroquoian; but unfortunately, by
combining the two it merely reminded one of a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of indeterminate sex. His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if
regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purifed and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">I have one favorite photograph of him. In this color snapshot taken by a onetime friend of mine, on a brilliant spring day, Shade is seen leaning on a sturdy cane that
had belonged to his aunt Maud (see line 86). I am wearing a white windbreaker acquired in a local sports shop and a pair of lilac slacks hailing from Cannes. My left hand is half raised - not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the
intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the picture; and the library book under my right arm is a treatise on certain Zemblan calisthenics in which I proposed to interest that young roomer
of mine who snapped the picture. A week later he was to betray my trust by taking sordid advantage of my absence on a trip to Washington whence I returned to find he had been entertaining a fiery-haired whore from</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms. Naturally we separated at once, and through a chink in the window curtains I saw bad
Bob standing rather pathetically, with his crewcut, and shabby valise, and the skis I had given him, all forlorn on the roadside, waiting for a fellow student to drive him away forever. I can forgive everything save treason.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">We never discussed, John Shade and I, any of my personal misfortunes. Our close friendship was on that higher, exclusively intellectual level where one can rest from
emotional troubles, not share them. My admiration for him was for me a sort of alpine cure. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him, especially in the presence of other people, inferior people. This wonder was enhanced by
my awareness of their not feeling what I felt, of their not seeing what I saw, of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve, so to speak, in the romance of his presence. Here he is, I would say to myself, that is his head,
containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him. He is looking from the terrace (of Prof. C.'s house on that March evening) at the distant lake. I am looking at him, I am
witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re- combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an
organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. And I experienced the same thrill as when in my early boyhood I once watched across the tea table in my uncle's castle a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and
was now quietly consuming a vanilla ice. I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his
marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards into his hat - and shook out a
poem.</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 21pt;text-align: justify;">To this poem we now must turn. My Foreword has been, I trust, not too skimpy. Other notes, arranged in a running commentary, will certainly satisfy the most voracious
reader. Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having
done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture. I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the
thing, or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table - not like the shaky little affair on which my typewriter is precariously enthroned now, in this wretched
motor lodge, with that carrousel inside and outside my head, miles away from New Wye. Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and
reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can
provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">Charles Kinbote</p>
<p class="s16" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">Oct. 19, 1959, Cedarn, Utana</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<h1 style="padding-top: 5pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">P<span class="h2">ALE </span>F<span class="h2">IRE</span></h1>
<h1 style="padding-top: 13pt;padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">A P<span class="h2">OEM IN </span>F<span class="h2">OUR </span>C<span class="h2">ANTOS</span></h1>
<h1 style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 98pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">C<span class="h2">ANTO </span>O<span class="h2">NE</span></h1>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: justify;">1 I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the
inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">10 Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A dull dark white against the day's pale white And abstract larches in the neutral light.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And then the gradual and dual blue</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">As night unites the viewer and the view, And in the morning, diamonds of frost</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">20 Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed From left to right the blank page of the road?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Reading from left to right in winter's code: A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse, Finding your China right behind my house. Was he in <i>Sherlock Holmes</i>, the fellow whose</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">All colors made me happy: even gray.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">30 My eyes were such that literally they</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt -</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide -</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Was printed on my eyelids' nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">40 Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">I cannot understand why from the lake</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I could make out our front porch when I'd take Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree Has intervened, I look but fail to see</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space Has caused a fold or furrow to displace The fragile vista, the frame house between</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">I had a favorite young shagbark there</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">50 With ample dark jade leaves and a black, spare, Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">It is now stout and rough; it has done well. White butterflies turn lavender as they</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway The phantom of my little daughter's swing.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The house itself is much the same. One wing We've had revamped. There's a solarium. There's</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">60 A picture window flanked with fancy chairs. TV's huge paperclip now shines instead</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Of the stiff vane so often visited</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">By the naïve, the gauzy mockingbird</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">Retelling all the programs she had heard; Switching from <i>chippo-chippo </i>to a clear</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">To-wee, to-wee<span class="p">; then rasping out: </span>come here, Come here, come herrr'<span class="p">; flirting her tail aloft, Or gracefully indulging in a
soft</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: justify;">Upward hop-flop, and instantly (<i>to-wee!</i>)</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">70 Returning to her perch - the new TV.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I was an infant when my parents died. They both were ornithologists. I've tried So often to evoke them that today</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">A preterist: one who collects cold nests.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">80 Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests. Here, tucked away by the Canadian maid,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I listened to the buzz downstairs and prayed For everybody to be always well,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Uncles and aunts, the maid, her niece Adéle Who'd seen the Pope, people in books, and God.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud, A poet and a painter with a taste</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">For realistic objects interlaced</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">With grotesque growths and images of doom.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">90 She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room We've kept intact. Its trivia create</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A still life in her style: the paperweight Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar, The human skull; and from the local <i>Star</i></p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">A curio: <i>Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4</i></p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">On Chapman's Homer<span class="p">, thumbtacked to the door.</span></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">My God died young. Theolatry I found</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">100 Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs a God; but was I free? How fully I felt nature glued to me</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">And how my childish palate loved the taste Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste! My picture book was at an early age</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The painted parchment papering our cage: Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">The iridule - when, beautiful and strange,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">110 In a bright sky above a mountain range One opal cloudlet in an oval form Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Which in a distant valley has been staged - For we are most artistically caged.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And there's the wall of sound: the nightly wall Raised by a trillion crickets in the fall.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Impenetrable! Halfway up the hill</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">I'd pause in thrall of their delirious trill.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">That's Dr. Sutton's light. That's the Great Bear.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">120 A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">They close like giant wings, and you are dead.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The regular vulgarian, I daresay, Is happier: he sees the Milky Way</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Only when making water. Then as now</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough, Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat,</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">130 I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I was the shadow of the waxwing slain</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">By feigned remoteness in the windowpane. I had a brain, five senses (one unique); But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps But really envied nothing - save perhaps</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The miracle of a lemniscate left Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft Bicycle tires.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 79pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">A thread of subtle pain,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">140 Tugged at by playful death, released again, But always present, ran through me. One day, When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy - A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy -</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed, There was a sudden sunburst in my head.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">150 Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">An icy shiver down my Age of Stone, And all tomorrows in my funnybone.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">During one winter every afternoon I'd sink into that momentary swoon.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And then it ceased. Its memory grew dim.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">160 My health improved. I even learned to swim.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">But like some little lad forced by a wench</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench, I was corrupted, terrified, allured,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And though old doctor Colt pronounced me cured Of what, he said, were mainly growing pains,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">The wonder lingers and the shame remains.</p>
<h1 style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 98pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Canto Two</h1>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known -</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">170 To every human being: I alone</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of books and people hid the truth from me. There was the day when I began to doubt Man's sanity: How could he live without</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And finally there was the sleepless night When I decided to explore and fight The foul, the inadmissible abyss,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">180 Devoting all my twisted life to this</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">One task. Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">The little scissors I am holding are A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">I stand before the window and I pare My fingernails and vaguely am aware</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb, Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum College astronomer Starover Blue;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">190 The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew; The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt; And little pinky clinging to her skirt. And I make mouths as I snip off the thin</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call "scarf-skin."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush And torsion of paralysis assail</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale, Famed for its sanitarium. There she'd sit</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">200 In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit Upon her dress and then upon her wrist. Her mind kept fading in the growing mist.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">She still could speak. She paused, and groped, and found</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">What seemed at first a serviceable sound, But from adjacent cells impostors took</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The place of words she needed, and her look Spelt imploration as she sought in vain</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">To reason with the monsters in her brain.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">What moment in the gradual decay</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">210 Does resurrection choose? What years? What day? Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape? Are some less lucky, or do all escape?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">A syllogism: <i>other men die; but I</i></p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Am not another; therefore I'll not die. <span class="p">Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time, A singing in the ears. In this hive I'm Locked up. Yet, </span>if
<span class="p">prior to life we had Been able to imagine life, what mad, Impossible, unutterably weird,</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">220 Wonderful nonsense it might have appeared!</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why Scorn a hereafter none can verify:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The Turk's delight, the future lyres, the talks With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks, The seraph with his six flamingo wings,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And Flemish hells with porcupines and things? It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The trouble is we do not make it seem</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Sufficiently unlikely; for the most</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">230 We can think up is a domestic ghost.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">How ludicrous these efforts to translate Into one's private tongue a public fate! Instead of poetry divinely terse, Disjointed notes, Insomnia's mean verse!</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Life is a message scribbled in the dark.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Anonymous.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 67pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Espied on a pine's bark,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">As we were walking home the day she died, An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed, Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">240 A gum-logged ant.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 88pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">That Englishman in Nice,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">A proud and happy linguist: <i>je nourris Les pauvres cigales </i>- meaning that he Fed the poor sea gulls!</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 69pt;text-align: justify;">Lafontaine was wrong: Dead is the mandible, alive the song.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Sybil, throughout our high-school days I knew Your loveliness, but fell in love with you During an outing of the senior class</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">250 To New Wye Falls. We luncheoned on damp grass. Our teacher of geology discussed</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The cataract. Its roar and rainbow dust Made the tame park romantic. I reclined In April's haze immediately behind</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Your slender back and watched your neat small head Bend to one side. One palm with fingers spread, Between a star of trillium and a stone,</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Pressed on the turf. A little phalange bone</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Kept twitching. Then you turned and offered me</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">260 A thimbleful of bright metallic tea.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Your profile has not changed. The glistening teeth Biting the careful lip; the shade beneath</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The eye from the long lashes; the peach down Rimming the cheekbone; the dark silky brown Of hair brushed up from temple and from nape; The very naked neck; the Persian shape</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of nose and eyebrow, you have kept it all - And on still nights we hear the waterfall.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">270 My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest My Admirable butterfly! Explain</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane, Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade?</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">We have been married forty years. At least</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Four thousand times your pillow has been creased By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes Has marked our common hour. How many
more</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">280 Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I love you when you're standing on the lawn Peering at something in a tree: "It's gone.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">It was so small. It might come back" (all this Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss).</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I love you when you call me to admire A jet's pink trail above the sunset fire.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I love you when you're humming as you pack A suitcase or the farcical car sack</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">With round-trip zipper. And I love you most</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">290 When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost And hold her first toy on your palm, or look At a postcard from her, found in a book.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">She might have been you, me, or some quaint blend: Nature chose me so as to wrench and rend</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Your heart and mine. At first we'd smile and say: "All little girls are plump" or "Jim McVey</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">(The family oculist) will cure that slight Squint in no time." And later. "She'll be quite Pretty, you know"; and, trying to assuage</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">300 The swelling torment: "That's the awkward age." "She should take riding lessons," you would say (Your eyes and mine not meeting). "She should play
Tennis, or badminton. Less starch, more fruit!</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">She may not be a beauty, but she's cute."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">It was no use, no use. The prizes won</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In French and history, no doubt, were fun;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">At Christmas parties games were rough, no doubt, And one shy little guest might be left out;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">But let's be fair: while children of her age</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">310 Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">That <i>she</i>'d helped paint for the school pantomime, My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom, And like a fool I sobbed in the men's room.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Another winter was scrape-scooped away.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May. Summer was power-mowed, and autumn, burned. Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Into a wood duck. And again your voice:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">320 "But this is prejudice! You should rejoice That she is innocent. Why overstress The physical? She <i>wants </i>to look a mess.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Virgins have written some <i>resplendent </i>books. Lovemaking is not everything. Good looks Are not <i>that </i>indispensable!" And still</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Old Pan would call from every painted hill, And still the demons of our pity spoke:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">No lips would share the lipstick of her smoke; The telephone that rang before a ball</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">330 Every two minutes in Sorosa Hall</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">For her would never ring; and, with a great Screeching of tires on gravel, to the gate</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Out of the lacquered night, a white-scarfed beau Would never come for her; she'd never go,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A dream of gauze and jasmine, to that dance. We sent her, though, to a château in France.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And she returned in tears, with new defeats, New miseries. On days when all the streets Of College Town led to the game, she'd sit</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">340 On the library steps, and read or knit; Mostly alone she'd be, or with that nice</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Frail roommate, now a nun; and, once or twice, With a Korean boy who took my course.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force Of character - as when she spent three nights Investigating certain sounds and lights</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In an old barn. She twisted words: pot, top, Spider, redips. And "powder" was "red wop." She called you a didactic katydid.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">350 She hardly ever smiled, and when she did, It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize Ferociously our projects, and with eyes Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head With psoriatic fingernails, and moan, Murmuring dreadful words in monotone.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">She was my darling. difficult, morose - But still my darling. You remember those</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Almost unruffled evenings when we played</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">360 Mah-jongg, or she tried on your furs, which made Her almost fetching; and the mirrors smiled,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The lights were merciful, the shadows mild, Sometimes I'd help her with a Latin text, Or she'd be reading in her bedroom, next To my fluorescent lair, and you would be</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In your own study, twice removed from me, And I would hear both voices now and then:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">370 "Mother, what's <i>grimpen</i>?" "What is what?"</p>
<p style="padding-left: 160pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">"Grim Pen."</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again: "Mother, what's <i>chtonic</i>?" That, too, you'd explain, Appending. "Would you like a tangerine?"</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"No. Yes. And what does <i>sempiternal </i>mean?" You'd hesitate. And lustily I'd roar</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">The answer from my desk through the closed door.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">It does not matter what it was she read (some phony modern poem that was said In English Lit to be a document</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"Engazhay and compelling" - what this meant Nobody cared); the point is that the three</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">380 Chambers, <i>then </i>bound by you and her and me,</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Now <span class="p">form a tryptich or a three-act play In which portrayed events forever stay.</span></p>
<p style="padding-top: 2pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 27pt;text-align: left;">I think she always nursed a small mad hope. I'd finished recently my book on Pope.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 11pt;text-align: justify;">Jane Dean, my typist, offered her one day</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">To meet Pete Dean, a cousin. Jane's fiancé Would then take all of them in his new car A score of miles to a Hawaiian bar.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">The boy was picked up at a quarter past</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">390 Eight in New Wye. Sleet glazed the roads. At last They found the place - when suddenly Pete Dean Clutching his brow exclaimed that he had clean Forgotten an appointment with a
chum</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Who'd land in jail if he, Pete, did not come, Et cetera. She said she understood.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">After he'd gone the three young people stood Before the azure entrance for awhile.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Puddles were neon-barred; and with a smile She said she'd be <i>de trop</i>, she'd much prefer</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">400 Just going home. Her friends escorted her To the bus stop and left; but she, instead Of riding home, got off at Lochanhead.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">You scrutinized your wrist: "It's eight fifteen. [And here time forked.] I'll turn it on." The screen In its blank-broth evolved a lifelike blur,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And music welled.</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 85pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">He took one look at her,</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And shot a death ray at well-meaning Jane.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A male hand traced from Florida to Maine The curving arrows of Aeolian wars.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">410 You said that later a quartet of bores, Two writers and two critics, would debate The Cause of Poetry on Channel 8.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A nymph came pirouetting, under white Rotating petals, in a vernal rite</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">To kneel before an altar in a wood Where various articles of toilet stood.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">I went upstairs and read a galley proof,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And heard the wind roll marbles on the roof.</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">"See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing"</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">420 Has unmistakably the vulgar ring</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of its preposterous age. Then came your call,</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">My tender mockingbird, up from the hall. I was in time to overhear brief fame</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And have a cup of tea with you: my name Was mentioned twice, as usual just behind (one oozy footstep) Frost.</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 111pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">"Sure you don't mind?</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I'll catch the Exton plane, because you know If I don't come by midnight with the dough -"</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And then there was a kind of travelog:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">430 A host narrator took us through the fog</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of a March night, where headlights from afar Approached and grew like a dilating star,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">To the green, indigo and tawny, sea Which we had visited in thirty-three,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Nine months before her birth. Now it was all Pepper-and-salt, and hardly could recall That first long ramble, the relentless light, The flock of sails (one blue among the white</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Clashed queerly with the sea, and two were red),</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">440 The man in the old blazer, crumbing bread, The crowding gulls insufferably loud,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And one dark pigeon waddling in the crowd. "Was that the phone?" You listened at the door. <i>More headlights in the fog. There was no sense In window-rubbing: only some
white fence And the reflector poles passed by unmasked.</i></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"Are we quite sure she's acting right?" you asked. "It's technically a blind date, of course.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">450 Well, shall we try the preview of <i>Remorse</i>?" And we allowed, in all tranquillity,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The famous film to spread its charmed marquee; The famous face flowed in, fair and inane:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The parted lips, the swimming eyes, the grain Of beauty on the cheek, odd gallicism,</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And the soft form dissolving in the prism Of corporate desire.</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: center;">"I think," she said,</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: center;">"I'll get off here." "It's only Lochanhead."</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: center;">"Yes, that's okay." Gripping the stang, she peered</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">460 <i>At ghostly trees. Bus stopped. Bus disappeared.</i></p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Thunder above the Jungle. "No, not that!" Pat Pink, our guest (antiatomic chat).</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Eleven struck. You sighed. "Well, I'm afraid There's nothing else of interest." You played Network roulette: the dial turned and trk'ed. Commercials were
beheaded. Faces flicked. An open mouth in midsong was struck out. An imbecile with sideburns was about</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">To use his gun, but you were much too quick.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">470 A jovial Negro raised his trumpet. Trk. Your ruby ring made life and laid the law.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Oh, switch it off! And as life snapped we saw A pinhead light dwindle and die in black Infinity.</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 64pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Out of his lakeside shack</p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent, Emerged with his uneasy dog and went Along the reedy bank. He came too late.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">You gently yawned and stacked away your plate. We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">480 Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No. I helped you with the dishes. The tall clock Kept on demolishing young root, old rock.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"Midnight," you said. What's midnight to the young? And suddenly a festive blaze was flung</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Across five cedar trunks, snowpatches showed, And a patrol car on our bumpy road</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Came to a crunching stop. Retake, retake!</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">People have thought she tried to cross the lake At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">490 From Exe to Wye on days of special frost. Others supposed she might have lost her way By turning left from Bridgeroad; and some say She took her poor young life. I know. You
know.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">It was a night of thaw, a night of blow,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">With great excitement in the air. Black spring Stood just around the corner, shivering</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In the wet starlight and on the wet ground. The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned. A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">500 Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.</p>
<h1 style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 85pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">C<span class="h2">ANTO </span>T<span class="h2">HREE</span></h1>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p class="s9" style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">L'if, <span class="p">lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais: The grand potato.</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 51pt;text-align: left;">I.P.H., a lay Institute (I) of Preparation (P)</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Called it - big if! - engaged me for one term To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm," Wrote President McAber).</p>
<p style="padding-left: 108pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">You and I,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye To Yewshade, in another, higher state.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">510 I love great mountains. From the iron gate Of the ramshackle house we rented there One saw a snowy form, so far, so fair, That one could only fetch a sigh, as if</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">It might assist assimilation.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 19pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: center;">Iph</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Was a larvorium and a violet:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">A grave in Reason's early spring. And yet</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed What mostly interests the preterist;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">For we die every day; oblivion thrives</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">520 Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files. I'm ready to become a floweret</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Or a fat fly, but never, to forget. And I'll turn down eternity unless The melancholy and the tenderness</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of mortal life; the passion and the pain; The claret taillight of that dwindling plane Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">530 On running out of cigarettes; the way You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme, This index card, this slender rubber band</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, Are found in Heaven by the newlydead</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Stored in its strongholds through the years.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 166pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Instead</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The Institute assumed it might be wise Not to expect too much of paradise: What if there's nobody to say hullo</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">To the newcomer, no reception, no</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">540 Indoctrination? What if you are tossed Into a boundless void, your bearings lost, Your spirit stripped and utterly alone,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Your task unfinished, your despair unknown, Your body just beginning to putresce,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">A non-undresssable in morning dress, Your widow lying prone on a dim bed, Herself a blur in your dissolving head!</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">While snubbing gods, including the big G,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">550 Iph borrowed some peripheral debris From mystic visions; and it offered tips (The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">How not to panic when you're made a ghost:, Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast, Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Or let a person circulate through you. How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">How to keep sane in spiral types of space.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">560 Precautions to be taken in the case Of freak reincarnation: what to do On suddenly discovering that you Are now a young and vulnerable toad</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Plump in the middle of a busy road, Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine, Or a book mite in a revived divine.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment. We give advice</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">570 To widower. He has been married twice:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both Jealous of one another. Time means growth.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And growth means nothing in Elysian life. Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond, But with a touch of tawny in the shade,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustrade The other sits and raises a moist gaze</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">580 Toward the blue impenetrable haze.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toy To give the babe? Does that small solemn boy Know of the head-on crash which on a wild</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">March night killed both the mother and the child? And she, the second love, with instep bare</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In ballerina black, why does she wear The earrings from the other's jewel case?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And why does she avert her fierce young face?</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">For as we know from dreams it is so hard</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">590 To speak to our dear dead! They disregard Our apprehension, queaziness and shame -</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The awful sense that they're not quite the same. And our school chum killed in a distant war</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Is not surprised to see us at his door. And in a blend of jauntiness and gloom</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Points at the puddles in his basement room.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">But who can teach the thoughts we should roll-call When morning finds us marching to the wall Under the stage direction of some goon</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">600 Political, some uniformed baboon?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">We'll think of matters only known to us - Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus; Listen to distant cocks crow, and discern Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall fern; And while our
royal hands are being tied, Taunt our inferiors, cheerfully deride</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The dedicated imbeciles, and spit Into their eyes just for the fun of it.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 30pt;text-align: left;">Nor can one help the exile, the old man 610 Dying in a motel, with the loud fan</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Revolving in the torrid prairie night</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And, from the outside, bits of colored light Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past He suffocates and conjures in two tongues</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The nebulae dilating in his lungs.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A wrench, a rift - that's all one can foresee. Maybe one finds <i>le grand néant</i>; maybe Again one spirals from the tuber's eye.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: center;">620 As you remarked the last time we went by The Institute: "I really could not tell</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The differences between this place and Hell."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">We heard cremationists guffaw and snort At Grabermann's denouncing the Retort As detrimental to the birth of wraiths.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">We all avoided criticizing faiths.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The great Starover Blue reviewed the role Planets had played as landfalls of the soul. The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">630 Discanted on the etiquette at teas With ancestors, and how far up to go. I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And dealt with childhood memories of strange Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Among our auditors were a young priest And an old Communist. Iph could at least Compete with churches and the party line.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In later years it started to decline: Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">640 Pale jellies and a floating mandolin. Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept <i>All is allowed</i>, into some classes crept;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A school of Freudians headed for the tomb.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">That tasteless venture helped me in a way. I learnt what to ignore in my survey</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of death's abyss. And when we lost our child I knew there would be nothing: no self-styled Spirit would touch a keyboard of dry wood</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">650 To rap out her pet name; no phantom would Rise gracefully to welcome you and me</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In the dark garden, near the shagbark tree.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"What is that funny creaking - do you hear?" "It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">"If you're not sleeping, let's turn on the light.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I hate that wind! Let's play some chess." "All right."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"I'm sure it's not the shutter. There - again." "It is a tendril fingering the pane."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"What glided down the roof and made that thud?"</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">660 "It is old winter tumbling in the mud."</p>
<p style="padding-top: 2pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 27pt;text-align: left;">"And now what shall I do? My knight is pinned." Who rides so late in the night and the wind?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 11pt;text-align: left;">It is the writer's grief. It is the wild</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">March wind. It is the father with his child.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Later came minutes, hours, whole days at last, when she'd be absent from our thoughts, so fast Did life, the woolly caterpillar run.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">We went to Italy. Sprawled in the sun.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 30pt;text-align: left;">On a white beach with other pink or brown 670 Americans. Flew back to our small town.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Found that my bunch of essays <i>The Untamed Seahorse </i>was "universally acclaimed"</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">(It sold three hundred copies in one year). Again school started, and on hillsides, where</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Wound distant roads, one saw the steady stream Of carlights all returning to the dream</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of college education. You went on Translating into French Marvell and Donne. It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">680 Lolita Swept from Florida to Maine.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied. Lang made your portrait. And one night I died.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The Crashaw Club had paid me to discuss Why Poetry Is Meaningful to Us.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I gave my sermon, a dull thing but short. As I was leaving in some haste, to thwart The so-called "question period" at the end, One of those peevish people who attend Such
talks only to say they disagree</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">690 Stood up and pointed with his pipe at me.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And then it happened - the attack, the trance, Or one of my old fits. There sat by chance</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A doctor in the front row. At his feet Patly I fell. My heart had stopped to beat,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">It seems, and several moments passed before It heaved and went on trudging to a more Conclusive destination. Give me now</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Your full attention.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 96pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">I can't tell you how</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 30pt;text-align: left;">I knew - but I did know that I had crossed 700 The border. Everything I loved was lost</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">But no aorta could report regret.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I realized, of course, that it was made Not of our atoms; that the sense behind</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">710 The scene was not our sense. In life, the mind Of any man is quick to recognize</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Natural shams, and then before his eyes The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big Wickedly folded moth. But in the case</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of my white fountain what it did replace Perceptually was something that, I felt, Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In the strange world where I was a mere stray.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">720 And presently I saw it melt away:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Though still unconscious I was back on earth. The tale I told provoked my doctor's mirth.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">He doubted very much that in the state He found me in "one could hallucinate Or dream in any sense. Later, perhaps, But not during the actual collapse.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: justify;">No, Mr. Shade."</p>
<p style="padding-left: 82pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: justify;">But, Doctor, I was dead!</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">He smiled. "Not quite: just half a shade," he said.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">However, I demurred. In mind I kept Replaying the whole thing. Again I stepped</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">730 Down from the platform, and felt strange and hot, And saw that chap stand up, and toppled, not Because a heckler pointed with his pipe,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">But probably because the time was ripe For just that bump and wobble on the part Of a limp blimp, an old unstable heart.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">My vision reeked with truth. It had the tone, The quiddity and quaintness of its own Reality. It was. As time went on.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">740 Its constant vertical in triumph shone. Often when troubled by the outer glare</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Of street and strife, inward I'd turn, and there, There in the background of my soul it stood, Old Faithful! And its presence always would Console me wonderfully. Then, one day,
</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I came across what seemed a twin display.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">It was a story in a magazine</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">About a Mrs. Z. whose heart had been</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Rubbed back to life by a prompt surgeon's hand.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">750 She told her interviewer of "The Land Beyond the Veil" and the account contained A hint of angels, and a glint of stained Windows, and some soft music, and a choice Of
hymnal items, and her mother's voice;</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">But at the end she mentioned a remote Landscape, a hazy orchard - and I quote: "Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke I glimpsed a tall white fountain -
and awoke."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 30pt;text-align: left;">If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt 760 Sees a new animal and captures it,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">And if, a little later, Captain Smith</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Brings back a skin, that island is no myth. Our fountain was a signpost and a mark Objectively enduring in the dark,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Strong as a bone, substantial as a tooth, And almost vulgar in its robust truth!</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The article was by Jim Coates. To Jim Forthwith I wrote. Got her address from him. Drove west three hundred miles to talk to her.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">770 Arrived. Was met by an impassioned purr.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Saw that blue hair, those freckled hands, that rapt Orchideous air - and knew that I was trapped.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">"Who'd miss the opportunity to meet A poet so distinguished?" It was sweet Of me to come! I desperately tried</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">To ask my questions. They were brushed aside: "Perhaps some other time." The journalist</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Still had her scribblings. I should not insist. She plied me with fruit cake, turning it all</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">780 Into an idiotic social call.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">"I can't believe," she said, "that it is <i>you!</i></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I loved your poem in the <i>Blue Review</i>. That one about <i>Mon Blon</i>. I have a niece</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Who's climbed the Matterhorn. The other piece I could not understand. I mean the sense.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Because, of course, the sound - But I'm so dense!"</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">She was. I might have persevered. I might Have made her tell me more about the white Fountain we both had seen "beyond the veil"</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">790 But if (I thought) I mentioned that detail She'd pounce upon it. as upon a fond Affinity, a sacramental bond,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">Uniting mystically her and me,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">And in a jiffy our two souls would be Brother and sister trembling on the brink Of tender incest. "Well," I said, "I think It's getting late..."</p>
<p style="padding-left: 99pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">I also called on Coates.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">He was afraid he had mislaid her notes. He took his article from a steel file: -</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">800 "It's accurate. I have not changed her style.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">There's one misprint - not that it matters much: Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch."</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint, And stop investigating my abyss?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">But all at once it dawned on me that <i>this </i>Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But a topsy-turvical coincidence,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: left;">810 Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">It did not matter who they were. No sound, No furtive light came from their involute Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute, Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns</p>
<p style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">820 To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns; Kindling a long life here, extinguishing A short one there; killing a Balkan king;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high- Flying airplane to plummet from the sky And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys, Glasses or pipe. Coordinating these Events and objects with
remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 5pt;text-indent: 0pt;line-height: 14pt;text-align: justify;">830 Stormcoated, I strode in: Sybil, it is</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">My firm conviction - "Darling, shut the door. Had a nice trip?" Splendid - but what is more I have returned convinced that I can grope</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">My way to some - to some - "Yes, dear?" Faint hope.</p>
<h1 style="padding-top: 4pt;padding-left: 92pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">C<span class="h2">ANTO </span>F<span class="h2">OUR</span></h1>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: justify;">None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done. And speaking of this wonderful machine:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: -30pt;text-align: left;">840 I'm puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: <i>A, </i>the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is
soaping a third time one leg, and <i>B</i>,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">The other kind, much more decorous, when He's in his study writing with a pen.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;"><br /></p>
<p style="padding-left: 36pt;text-indent: 0pt;text-align: left;">In method B the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought.</p>