Alexey Sklyarenko spotted the theme I had asked about
(Nabokov's The Ballad of Longwood Glen ) and sent the lines obtained from
the NY site.
He remarked on a curious word, perhaps a
misspelling, and inquired about "And the
rrkoon* dripped gold) was felled and searched." :
*crown?
After being reminded of Nabokov's poem, I remembered
that it's been printed by Page Stegner in "The Portable Nabokov", so I checked.
The word is "moon"
"And the sky-bound oak (where owls had
perched
And the moon dripped gold) was
felled and searched." (July 6, 1957)
My desktop-search was equally informative.Abraham
P. Socher, in "Shades of Frost" observed that: "In the spring of 1958,
Nabokov was still in the midst of his seemingly endless commentary on Pushkin's
great verse novel Eugene Onegin, which also included a foreword and an index.
Nabokov had already observed misguided waxwings crashing against his window,
and even composed a narrative in heroic couplets, "The Ballad of Longwood Glen", which he had recently
revised and published in the New Yorker, though it was a much lighter poem
than his eventual "Pale Fire". He was also contemplating a novel which involved
an exiled king (though he was neither a homosexual nor a literary commentator)
and the question of immortality. When Nabokov read "Of a Winter Evening", after
almost two decades of American exile in which he seemed to be always shadowing
Frost, it combined with these and other elements in his
imagination."