In his Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a canceled entry in his diary, "promnad vespert mid J. S.":
I crept back to my cheerless domicile with a heavy heart and a puzzled mind. The heart remained heavy but the puzzle was solved a few days later, very probably on St. Swithin's Day, for I find in my little diary under that date the anticipatory "promnad vespert mid J. S.," crossed out with a petulance that broke the lead in midstroke. Having waited and waited for my friend to join me in the lane, until the red of the sunset had turned to the ashes of dusk, I walked over to his front door, hesitated, assessed the gloom and the silence, and started to walk around the house. This time not a glint came from the back parlor, but by the bright prosaic light in the kitchen I distinguished one end of a whitewashed table and Sybil sitting at it with so rapt a look on her face that one might have supposed she had just thought up a new recipe. The back door was ajar, and as I tapped it open and launched upon some gay airy phrase, I realized that Shade, sitting at the other end of the table, was in the act of reading to her something that I guessed to be a part of his poem. They both started. An unprintable oath escaped from him and he slapped down on the table the stack of index cards he had in his hand. Later he was to attribute this temperamental outburst to his having mistaken, with his reading glasses on, a welcome friend for an intruding salesman; but I must say it shocked me, it shocked me greatly, and disposed me at the time to read a hideous meaning into everything that followed. "Well, sit down," said Sybil, "and have some coffee" (victors are generous). I accepted, as I wanted to see if the recitation would be continued in my presence. It was not. "I thought," I said to my friend, "you were coming out with me for a stroll." He excused himself saying he felt out of sorts, and continued to clean the bowl of his pipe as fiercely as if it were my heart he was hollowing out. (note to Lines 47-48)
In his Ode to Psyche (1819) Keats calls Vesper (the planet Venus) "amorous glow-worm of the sky:"
O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
In Shakespeare's Hamlet (1.5) the Ghost says that the glow-worm begins to pale his uneffectual fire:
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire:
Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.
Promnad vespert mid J. S. and a new recipe thought up by Sybil Shade (as imagined by Kinbote) bring to mind "a promenade for cooks and ancient ladies" mentioned by the Castle Builder in fragments of Keats's dialogue The Castle Builder:
Sir, Convent Garden is a monstrous beast
From morning, four o’clock, to twelve at noon,
It swallows cabbages without a spoon.
And then, from twelve till two, this Eden made is
A promenade for cooks and ancient ladies;
And then for supper, ’stead of soup and poaches,
It swallows chairmen, damns, and Hackney coaches.
In short, Sir, ’tis a very place for monks,
For it containeth twenty thousand punks,
Which any man may number for his sport,
By following fat elbows up a court.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
In such like nonsense would I pass an hour
With random Friar, or Rake upon his tour,
Or one of few of that imperial host
Who came unmaimed from the Russian frost.
The title of Keats's poem reminds one of Ibsen's play The Master Builder (1892). In his Index Kinbote mentions a well-known and very courageous master builder and his three young apprentices: Yan, Yonny, and Angeling:
Shadows, the, a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (q. v.) to assassinate the self-banished king; its leader's terrible name cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar; his maternal grandfather, a well-known and very courageous master builder, was hired by Thurgus the Turgid, around 1885, to make certain repairs in his quarters, and soon after that perished, poisoned in the royal kitchens, under mysterious circumstances, together with his three young apprentices whose first names Yan, Yonny, and Angeling, are preserved in a ballad still to be heard in some of our wilder valleys.
Angeling brings to mind an Angel's wings mentioned by Keats in Lamia (1820):
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
St. Swithin's Day (July 15) makes one think of Keats's poems The Eve of St. Mark (1819) and The Eve of St. Agnes (1820). St. Swithin, St. Mark and St. Agnes remind one of Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, one of the two seconds in Demon Veen's sword duel with Baron d'Onsky). Prishli i stali teni nochi (“The shadows of the night came and mounted guard at my door,” 1842) is a poem by Yakov Polonski (a namesake of Jakob Gradus, Shade's murderer):
Пришли и стали тени ночи
На страже у моих дверей!
Смелей глядит мне прямо в очи
Глубокий мрак её очей;
Над ухом шепчет голос нежный,
И змейкой бьётся мне в лицо
Её волос, моей небрежной
Рукой измятое, кольцо.
Помедли, ночь! густою тьмою
Покрой волшебный мир любви!
Ты, время, дряхлою рукою
Свои часы останови!
Но покачнулись тени ночи,
Бегут, шатаяся, назад.
Её потупленные очи
Уже глядят и не глядят;
В моих руках рука застыла,
Стыдливо на моей груди
Она лицо своё сокрыла…
О солнце, солнце! Погоди!