In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his childhood and mentions hickory leaves and his favorite young shagbark tree:
All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt -
An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide -
Was printed on my eyelids' nether side
Where it would tarry for an hour or two,
And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.
I cannot understand why from the lake
I could make out our front porch when I'd take
Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree
Has intervened, I look but fail to see
Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space
Has caused a fold or furrow to displace
The fragile vista, the frame house between
Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green.
I had a favorite young shagbark there
With ample dark jade leaves and a black, spare,
Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun
Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone
Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell.
It is now stout and rough; it has done well.
White butterflies turn lavender as they
Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway
The phantom of my little daughter's swing. (ll. 49-57)
In his note to line 49 (shagbark) Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) writes:
A hickory. Our poet shared with the English masters the noble knack of transplanting trees into verse with their sap and shade. Many years ago Disa, our King's Queen, whose favorite trees were the jacaranda and the maidenhair, copied out in her album a quatrain from John Shade's collection of short poems Hebe's Cup, which I cannot refrain from quoting here (from a letter I received on April 6, 1959, from southern France):
THE SACRED TREE
The gingko leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread
In shape.
When the new Episcopal church in New Wye (see note to line 549) was built, the bulldozers spared an arc of those sacred trees planted by a landscaper of genius (Repburg) at the end of the so-called Shakespeare Avenue, on the campus. I do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line, and "tree" in Zemblan is grados.
Shagbark Hickory is a poem by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), an American poet whom Kinbote quotes in his note to line 949 (in which Kinbote describes Gradus' day in New York):
In the moonlight under a shag-bark hickory tree
Watching the yellow shadows melt in hoof-pools,
Listening to the yes and the no of a woman’s hands,
I kept my guess why the night was glad.
The night was lit with a woman’s eyes.
The night was crossed with a woman’s hands,
The night kept humming an undersong.
On the other hand, at the beginning of his narrative poem Valhalla (1938) Robert Francis mentions the hickory wood:
The October day that Leif was twelve years old
His father gave him an ax to be his own.
When the boy fitted his hand about the helve
And thanked his father for the gift that his smile
Told how much he had wanted, they may have noticed,
Father and mother, that the hickory wood
Matched his hair as well as hard and soft
May match, and that this grayness of the steel
Resembled something gray in his blue eyes.
If the mother thought of danger, she said nothing.
Danger she knew was never dulled with talking,
The danger that must be and is best to be.
In his Foreword to Shade's poem Kinbote mentions a certain ferocious lady at whose club he had refused to speak on the subject of "The Hally Vally:"
Oh, there were many such incidents. In a skit performed by a group of drama students I was pictured as a pompous woman hater with a German accent, constantly quoting Housman and nibbling raw carrots; and a week before Shade's death, a certain ferocious lady at whose club I had refused to speak on the subject of "The Hally Vally" (as she put it, confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a Finnish epic), said to me in the middle of a grocery store, "You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you," and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: "What's more, you are insane." But let me not pursue the tabulation of nonsense. Whatever was thought, whatever was said, I had my full reward in John's friendship. This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart. His whole being constituted a mask. John Shade's physical appearance was so little in keeping with the harmonies hiving in the man, that one felt inclined to dismiss it as a coarse disguise or passing fashion; for if the fashions of the Romantic Age subtilized a poet's manliness by baring his attractive neck, pruning his profile and reflecting a mountain lake in his oval gaze, present-day bards, owing perhaps to better opportunities of aging, look like gorillas or vultures. My sublime neighbor's face had something about it that might have appealed to the eye, had it been only leonine or only Iroquoian; but unfortunately, by combining the two it merely reminded one of a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of indeterminate sex. His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purifed and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation.
A character in Robert Francis' Valhalla, Leif (a boy who dies young) brings to mind "L'if, lifeless tree!" at the beginning of Canto Three of Shade's poem:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato. I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it - big if! - engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber). You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state. (ll. 501-509)
If is French for “yew.” Yew-Trees and Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 are poems by William Wordsworth. Pushkin's Sonet ("A Sonnet," 1830) has the epigraph from Wordsworth: "Scorn not the sonnet, critic." Shade lives in the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green.