Matt Roth: Interesting thoughts
regarding "The Exile" and Shade's variant….In
the end, I sided with Kinbote (!) in scanning Baudelaire as two syllables.
Someone else, I believe, pointed out that the line is really closer to being a
succession of spondees… Anyway, I am pleased
by your "Exile" find*, and if your reading of the prosody is correct,
it certainly lends credibility to the notion that Baudelaire here could be
scanned in the same way.
JM: Gary’s connection of “Exile” and
Kinbote’s variant is, indeed, an excellent find regarding a clue for how to
read “Baudelaire.” Nevertheless, since amphibracs (as the original title of
Exile indicates) are seldom employed from beginning to end of any “serious”
poem in English, we must count on finding iambic and trochaic variations and
other mixtures (Stan, nice Greek names for you: Coriambic and Antispast. Btw:
the opposite stress for amphibracs are named “amphimacer, or cretic”) . Why not
a iambic pentameter indicating Baud’laire?
Like Jerry
Friedman, I confess that “I'm not enough of a scholar to read all of
"The Pickerel Pond", but I did notice that the speaker of the poem
calls himself "perverse"…” (unlike him, I’m not a scholar at all)
with the stress on the signifier “verse”,** and I’m looking forward to your,
Matt’s, reading into Wilson’s “Night Rote” to explore, among other items, the
“powder/redwop” inclusion in PF, something that will equally demand a lot of
your time and patience.
Jerry’s reminder about Zembla and the Dunciad is timely. (Kiran Krishna quoted
them in a post in 2000, along with the mention of Zembla in "The
Dunciad" http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0007&L=nabokv-l&D=0&O=D&P=788.)
Jerry, the
time-fork (or was it a pleat in space?) which impeded Shade to see his house
from the lake is worth examining further, as I’m sure you have been probing
into. I tend to think along the same lines as yours (that it was not due to
tears obstructing the view).
You wrote: “Jansy asked how the weather at Hazel's death agrees with the
description in lines 483-487 of the police car coming to the Shades'
house. There are only patches of snow because of the thaw, and though
possibly the wind wouldn't affect the police car's headlights illuminating the
cedar trunks, possibly flying leaves and swaying branches of shrubs would
create a flicker, which I think is consistent with "festive blaze"…”
My point is that, judging by Shade’s lines even after writing in
retrospect of the fatidic night, the mood inside the Shade house was not
indicative of any stormy weather, neither inside nor outside. Perhaps,
unused as I am to winter conditions in the northern hemisphere, I’m wrong in
assuming that some of the external noise, trepidation and tension would have
oozed into the parent’s mind (although Hazel was over twenty-two and must have
suffered various other slights or been invited to another blind-date and Shade
was a rather selfish guy).
………………………………………………………………………………………
* - Gary
Lipon: “I was much amused by
the poem The Exile by VN that Jansy passed along, due to its scansion of
the name…(and) Matt & Tiff's interpretation of Kinbote's comment to line
231
regarding some dashes in a variant he
claims to have. [I hope to send out soon a post on amphibrachs & anapests
& such.] Here is a scan of the relevant lines from The Exile:
Verlaine had been also a teacher
somewhere
in
England. And what about great Baudelaire,
alone
in his Belgi-an hell?
[Actually, in isolation these lines might
be scanned as iambic pentameter!
Verlaine had
been also a teacher somewhere
in England.
And what about great Baud'laire,
alone in
his Belgian hell? ]
** - Jacques Lacan
played, not aimlessly, with the French derivative: “ la père-version.”
(père:father)