The season he mentions is not the autumn he spends in
the Cedarn cave, but applied to when, in "those
March nights their house was as black as a coffin". His
comments create new furrows in time/space also because he is
musing about "stealthy rustles, the footsteps of yesteryear
leaves..." ( which may be conjured in the mind alone). Here Kinbote's
uses a word that reminded me of one applied in translations of
François Villon's "Ballade des dames du temps jadis", to the English,
ie, to "d'antan/yesteryear."*
His mood led me to a sonnet related to this season: "To Autumn," by
John Keats and, in fact, I found a similar lamentation in its third stanza:
"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?"
Perhaps it's too long a stretch into "analogic incrustations" ( from
"yesteryear/d'antan" into "where are they?").
In the meantime I found myself humming a song by Stan Kelly-Bootle's
friend, Pete Seeger, which I associate to my stay in the US: "Where have all
the flowers gone?" and exploring Wiki.
Perhaps, in fact, it's almost a delirious notion to find,
through Kinbote's choice of only one word, an entire theme which, so it
seems to me, is characteristic not only of Nabokov's "Pale Fire," but of
many other novels of his (I think Villon's "yesteryear snows" are
directly mentioned in "Ada"?).
Namely "Ubi Sunt?" (where have all my childhood years
gone...my Russia, my native tongue, my father, my first loves?)
Wiki: "Ubi sunt is a phrase that begins
several Latin medieval poems and occurs, for example, in the second stanza of
the song "De Brevitate Vitae" (also known as "Gaudeamus Igitur"). The theme was
the common property of medieval Latin poets: Cicero may not have been available,
but Boethius' line was known: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent?
...Sometimes thought to indicate nostalgia, the "ubi sunt motif" is
actually a meditation on mortality and life's transience. In medieval Persian
poetry, Ubi sunt? is a pervasive theme in The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam:
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say:
Yes, but where
leaves the Rose of Yesterday?**
And this first Summer month that brings the
Rose
Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.
Prominent ubi sunt
Anglo-Saxon poems are The Wanderer, Deor, The Ruin, and The Seafarer (all part
of a collection known as the Exeter Book, the largest surviving collection of
Old English literature). The Wanderer most exemplifies Ubi sunt
poetry in its use of erotema (the rhetorical question):
Where is the
horse gone?
Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the
seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Ubi sunt poetry also figures in some of Shakespeare's plays. When
Hamlet finds skulls in the Graveyard (V. 1), these rhetorical questions
appear:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and
now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those
lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your
gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment,that were wont to set the table
on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning -- quite chap-fall'n. Now get
you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this
favor she must come; make her laugh at that.¨
More links to "Ubi Sunt?" are: Carpe diem; Timor mortis conturbat me;
Memento mori ; Vanitas ( Nabokovian themes, all of them and "Vanitas"
figures prominently in Pale Fire's references to "Arcady" and "chained
Dementia"...)
..............................................................................................................
* Mais où sont les neiges d'antan! François Villon
Ballade des dames du temps jadis
** Cp. to Nabokov's lines about the "Swift"
(often quoted in the list).