In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells about his dead daughter. Asking her mother what this or that word means, Hazel Shade mentioned the word sempiternal:
She was my darling - difficult, morose -
But still my darling. You remember those
Almost unruffled evenings when we played
Mah-jongg, or she tried on your furs, which made
Her almost fetching; and the mirrors smiled,
The lights were merciful, the shadows mild,
Sometimes I'd help her with a Latin text,
Or she'd be reading in her bedroom, next
To my fluorescent lair, and you would be
In your own study, twice removed from me,
And I would hear both voices now and then:
"Mother, what's grimpen?" "What is what?" "Grim Pen."
Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:
"Mother, what's chtonic?" That, too, you'd explain,
Appending, "Would you like a tangerine?"
"No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?"
You'd hesitate. And lustily I'd roar
The answer from my desk through the closed door. (ll. 357-376)
The word sempiternal (eternal and unchanging; everlasting) was used by T. S. Eliot ("toilest" in reverse, as Kinbote points out in his commentary) at the beginning of Little Gidding, the fourth and final poem in Eliot's Four Quartets (a book that Hazel is reading):
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer? (I)
The unimaginable Zero summer brings to mind Omega, Ozero, and Zero - the three conjoined lakes mentioned by Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in his commentary to Shade's poem:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton’s old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.’s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because all kinds of descriptive booklets should be available to the reader by writing to the University's Publicity Office, but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences. (note to Lines 47-48)
In Ozero (lake in Russian) there is Zero. The poet's daughter, Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega. In his poem Spicebush and Witch-Hazel Robert Francis (an American poet, 1901-87) mentions the alpha and omega:
Spicebush almost the first dark twig to flower
In April woods, witch-hazel last of all–
Six months from flower of spring to flower of fall–
The alpha and omega if you please.
Yet how alike in color, setting, form:
Both blossoms yellow to confirm the sun,
Both borne on bushes that are nearly trees,
Both close to twig though not to keep them warm.
Only the learned might elucidate
Why one blooms early and one blooms late.
Only the wise could tell the wiser one.
In his poem Waxwings Robert Francis compares himself to a cedar waxwing:
Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
in sun, and I am one.
Such merriment and such sobriety—
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk—
was this not always my true style?
Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?
To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together—for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.
Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. At the beginning of his poem Shade says:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski. Its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin has the same first name as Jakob Gradus (the poet's murderer who is Kinbote's double). In fact, the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his murderer Gradus seem to represent three different aspects of one and the same person whose "real" name is Botkin. The "real" name of Samuel Shade (the poet's father), King Alfin (the father of Charles the Beloved) and Martin Gradus (the father of the poet's murderer) seems to be Pyotr Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Petrovich Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's “real” name). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.