A.Bouazza: “I… would like to draw attention to a relevant and interesting passage from Thomas Hardy’s novel which I read a while ago:” [   ] They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet…” Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, pp. 340-41 (Macmillan [1887] 1975, New Wessex Edition, ed. Furbank)

Jansy Mello:  What an interesting (and meticulous) find relating VN’s “Signs and Symbols” and Hardy’s lines about an arboreal alphabet made possible by “mentally collected” signs and symbols.  It reminded me of a few lines from Baudelaire’s synesthetic “Correspondences,”* a sonnet that Nabokov would have been familiar with (as I suppose would also be the case of the Hardy paragraph you quoted).

The “gesticulating trees” in one of V.Nabokov’s poems ** must be part of this “raw awareness” to the natural world (and unnatural words) that haunt him, toss and peer at intervals through his various writings.

…………………………………………………………….
* -  Correspondences

Nature is a temple in which living pillars 
Sometimes give voice to confused words; 
Man passes there through forests of symbols 
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance 
In a deep and tenebrous unity, 
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day, 
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.
…………
translator— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

** - RAIN

How mobile is the bed on these
nights of gesticulation trees
when the rain clatters fast,
the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof,
trotting upon an endless roof,
traveling into the past […].

(I fear that the lines above are not precise, I copied them from an online quote)

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