In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions “Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp:”
While snubbing gods, including the big G,
Iph borrowed some peripheral debris
From mystic visions; and it offered tips
(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -
How not to panic when you're made a ghost:
Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast,
Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,
Or let a person circulate through you.
How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,
Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.
How to keep sane in spiral types of space.
Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine. (ll. 549-566)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), “How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp” is the loveliest couplet in this Canto. Jasp is an obsolete form of jasper, a semiprecious chalcedony (or microcrystalline quartz), usually red, brown or green in color. In his poem The Sphinx (1894) Oscar Wilde mentions the Sphinx's jasper claws:
And take a tiger for your mate,
Whose amber sides are flecked with black,
And ride upon his gilded back
In triumph through the Theban gate,
And toy with him in amorous jests,
And when he turns and snarls and gnaws,
Oh smite him with your jasper claws
And bruise him with your agate breasts!
A tiger's amber sides bring to mind the amber spectacles for life's eclipse mentioned by Shade. Earlier in his poem Wilde speaks of the Sphinx's curving claws of yellow ivory:
And let me touch those curving claws
Of yellow ivory and grasp
The tail that like a monstrous Asp
Coils round your heavy velvet paws!
The rhyme grasp-Asp brings to mind the rhyme gasp-jasp used by Shade. In a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) Wilde mentions the tower of ivory:
I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this man [the Marquess of Queensberry, Bosie's father]. The tower of ivory is assailed by the foul thing. On the sand is my life split. I don't know what to do.
According to Kinbote, writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory:
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end.
It is easy to sneer at Conmal's faults. They are the naive failings of a great pioneer. He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory - which was also John Shade's mistake, in a way.
We should not forget that when Conmal began his stupendous task no English author was available in Zemblan except Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England, and some fragments of Byron translated from French versions. (note to Line 962)
A lady novelist in ten volumes, Jane de Faun brings to mind the ivory limbed and brown-eyed Faun in Wilde's poem In the Forest:
Out of the mid-wood's twilight
Into the meadow's dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!
He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!
O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!
At the end of Canto Three of his poem Shade mentions ivory unicorns and ebon fauns (chess pieces):
It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns;
Kindling a long life here, extinguishing
A short one there; killing a Balkan king;
Causing a chunk of ice formed on a high
Flying airplane to plummet from the sky
And strike a farmer dead; hiding my keys,
Glasses or pipe. Coordinating these
Events and objects with remote events
And vanished objects. Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities. (ll. 816-829)
Like Shade's unicorns and fauns, Kinbote's tower of yellow ivory (in which writers should not keep constantly meditating) seems to be a chess piece (a white rook).