In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions winter's code:
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.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost
Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter's code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back... A pheasant's feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (ll. 1-28)
In 1904 The Code of Hammurabi (a Babylonian legal text composed during 1755–1750 BC written in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, purportedly by Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon) was translated into English by Robert Francis Harper (1864-1914), a leading Assyriologist and Professor of Semitic languages at the University of Chicago. Kinbote's landlord, Judge Goldsworth is an authority on Roman Law. Shade's full name is John Francis Shade. In the last line of his poem Sheep (included in Valhalla and Other Poems, 1938) Robert Francis mentions a sheep's Babylonian face:
From where I stand the sheep stand still
As stones against the stony hill.
The stones are gray
And so are they.
And both are weatherworn and round,
Leading the eye back to the ground.
Two mingled flocks—
The sheep, the rocks.
And still no sheep stirs from its place
Or lifts its Babylonian face.
In his poem Blue Winter (1932) Robert Francis mentions shade:
Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice,
Another blue for shadows over snow.
The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice -
Both different blues. And hills row after row
Are colored blue according to how for.
You know the bluejay's double-blur device
Shows best when there are no green leaves to show.
And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star.
An American poet, Robert Francis (1901-87) lived most of his life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Lady Amherst's pheasant (Chrysolophus amherstiae) is a bird of the order Galliformes and the family Phasianidae. The English name and amherstiae commemorates Sarah Amherst (a British naturalist and scientist, 1762-1838), who was responsible for sending the first specimen of the bird to London in 1828. Lady Amherst's pheasant is sometimes referred to as the Chinese copper pheasant.
Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Professor Kinbote is the author of a remarkable book on surnames. Ob'yasnenie assiriyskikh imyon ("The Exegesis of Assyrian Names," 1868) and Prichina nenavisti anglichan k slavyanskim narodam ("The Reason why the English Hate the Slavic Peoples," 1877) are books by Platon Lukashevich (1809-87), Gogol's schoolmate at the Nezhin Lyceum. According to Kinbote, the surname Lukashevich comes from Luke (one of the four Evangelists):
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building a "hurley-house." But enough of this. (note to Line 71)
Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade's poem in Cedarn, Utana. In his poem Waxwings Robert Francis says that he is one the four cedar waxwins chatting on a February berry bush (presumably, a juniper):
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 first met Shade on February 16, 1959:
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. (Foreword)
The fortress of an apple and the impregnable fortress of Shade's house (mentioned by Kinbote in his commentary) bring to mind 'Fort Juniper,' as Robert Francis called his house in Amherst. The Seed Eaters is a poem by Robert Francis:
The seed eaters, the vegetarian birds,
Redpolls, grosbeaks, crossbills, finches, siskins,
Fly south to winter in our north, so making
A sort of Florida of our best blizzards.
Weed seeds and seeds of pine cones are their pillage,
Alder and birch catkins such vegetable
Odds and ends as the winged keys of maple
As well as roadside sumac, red-plush-seeded.
Hi! with a bounce in snowflake flocks come juncos
As if a hand had flipped them and tree sparrows,
Now nip and tuck and playing tag, now squatting
All weather-proofed and feather-fluffed on snow.
Hard fare, full feast, I'll say, deep cold, high spirits.
Here's Christmas to Candlemas on a bunting's budget.
From this old seed eater with his beans, his soybeans,
Cracked corn, cracked wheat, peanuts and split peas, hail!
Candlemas (also known as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the Feast of the Holy Encounter) is based upon the account of the presentation of Jesus in Luke 2: 22-40. It is celebrated forty days after Christmas (in the West, on February 2). July 21 (the day of Shade's death) is the 202nd day of the year. The author of Shade's obituary, Professor Hurley asks the poet if he has a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202. In his poem Brozhy li ya vdol' ulits shumnykh ("Whether I roam along the noisy streets: 1829) Pushkin (who died on January 29, 1837, two days after his fatal duel with d'Anthès) says that he always tries to guess the anniversary of his future death. Kinbote completes his work on Shade's poem and commits suicide on October 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin's Lyceum). There is a hope that, after Kinbote's death, Professor Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent who went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda), like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin's epigrams, "half-milord, half-merchant, etc."), will be full again.
Robert Francis most famous poem is The Pitcher (1953):
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.
Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.
In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throws ("pitches") the baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of retiring a batter, who attempts to either make contact with the pitched ball or draw a walk. In the numbering system used to record defensive plays, the pitcher is assigned the number 1. A football goalkeeper, VN would also be assigned the number 1. In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions a curio in Aunt Maud's collection, a report of the baseball events:
I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,
A poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.
She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman's Homer, thumbtacked to the door. (ll. 86-98)
Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter whose "real" name seems to be Nadezhda Botkin) brings to mind Robert Francis' poem Spicebush and Witch-Hazel:
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.
Alpha (Α or α) and omega (Ω or ω) are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a title of Christ and God in the Book of Revelation. The phrase "I am the Alpha and the Omega" is an appellation of Jesus and of the Father in the Book of Revelation. Shade's daughter drowned in Lake Omega. Alphina is the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters. King Alfin (Alfin the Vague) is the father of Charles the Beloved. Witch-Hazel brings to mind not only Hazel Shade, but also "the third in the witch row" (Kinbote's remark during the conversation at the Faculty Club). The name witch in witch-hazel has its origins in Middle English wiche, from the Old English wice, meaning "pliant" or "bendable", and is not related to the word witch meaning a practitioner of magic. Jacob George Strutt's 1822 book, Sylva Britannica attests that "Wych Hazel" was used in England as a synonym for wych elm, the entirely unrelated Ulmus glabra. The use of the twigs as divining rods, just as hazel twigs were used in England, may also have, by folk etymology, influenced the "witch" part of the name.