Matthew Roth's link shows that
Frost's poem about "eavesdropping" was published in the fifties#.
However Matt notes that he doesn't see "anything here in terms of
inspiration--just two poets latching onto the same
metaphor."
However, my elaborate story about the repetitive appearances
of "bright" in Kinbote's ramblings as indicative of
"frost/eavesdropping" may end up showing an interesting element
of Nabokov's style, after all, should we admit that
it's possible that Nabokov had read Frost's 1950 Christmas Poem
sometime before he made Kinbote pen his "eavesdropping" commentaries to
Shade's "stillicide". Following Matt's initial
argument I say that I can agree with him that we have no proof that
the poet Shade ever considered the dropping goutlets as indicative
of any "eavesdropping" interferences (also Hardy did not*). But
that Frost and Nabokov (through Charles Kinbote) share a similar image
(or metaphor) remains an open question and it indicates a particular misleading twist intended by
the author...
Recapitulating: Shade's lines connect stilettos to stillicide. However,
the suspended menace lies not in the latter - but in the
fact that the sound and motion of falling drops is stopped by
their having been congealed by...frost. Frost has turned a
harmless stillicide into something
as dangerous as "the organ-pipe-like system of
huge icicles that hung from the eaves and gloriously burnt in the sun"
("Mademoiselle O")**.
Charles Kinbote is writing from his Cedarn Cave.
He cannot quote Hardy (or Frost), but he must have carried a
dictionary along. He informs us that he's read Thomas Hardy, as Shade
must have***.
Suddenly his commentary veers off to suggest
"the shadow of a regicide" (it's only a matter of rhyme, though, a question of
trifling sounds...), and now he introduces the "bright eavesdrop" (the dripping murmur seems to have
disappeared to give place to the dangerously frozen stilettos "gloriously burning in the sun").
Kinbote made explicit the possible multiple
meanings of eavesdropping (stillicide and the gossipy snoop). He
repeats the word "bright" perhaps immitating Frost's iteration
of "eaves"****.(three times), "eavesdropping" (twice), "haze" (twice,
counting in the poem's very last line).
It means that, if not Shade, at least Kinbote
could have been familiar with Hardy's verses, which might have
interest him because they point to him as the poet's constant
and noisy eavesdropper, already listening in while the couple is isolated,
in the back of their house, hazily pondering about their daughter's
suicide.
* "the
svelte/Stilettos of a frozen stillicide" (Shade, lines 34/35)
and Hardy's: They’ve a way of whispering to me —
fellow-wight who yet
abide —
In the muted, measured note
Of a ripple under archways,
or a
lone cave’s stillicide.
(Hardy is
describing the sound of dripping water issuing from a stalactite that hangs
inside a cave, not the stalactite itself, unlike
Shade.)
** "Mademoiselle O":" She had not allowed us to
walk under the organ-pipe-like system of huge icicles that hung from the eaves
and gloriously burned in the low
sun."
*** My dictionary defines it as "a
succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop." I remember
having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright
frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop. We should also note the
cloak-and-dagger hint-glint in the "svelte stilettos" and the shadow of regicide
in the rhyme." (Charles Kinbote, commentary to lines
34/35). Stillicide: "The word is
not one of that melancholy collection ending in -cide that refers to an act of
killing or something that kills (suicide, pesticide), since it comes from a
different Latin verb, caedere, to fall. The first part is from Latin stilla, a
drop; the English word is a reformulation of Latin stillicidium, falling drops.
The Latin word could mean in particular the drip of rain from the eaves of a
house, which is exactly equivalent to an ancient meaning of our eavesdrop."
(Michael Quinion);"Water falling in drops, especially in a row from the eaves of
a roof, or from icicles or stalactites." (Wikipedia)
**** Frost':
"Let us pretend the dewdrops from the
eaves
Are you and I eavesdropping on their unrest--
A mist and smoke
eavesdropping on a haze--"
.