[EDNOTE.  Congratulations to Matthew on his discovery!  It would be nice to see this insight, and various others contributed by other subscribers of late, refined, polished, and submitted for publication in The Nabokovian, Nabokov Studies, or elsewhere.  SES]

 

Thanks to the wonders of Interlibrary Loan and the poetry collection of
Pittsburg State (KS), I've finally tracked down the Edsel Ford poem from
which Kinbote quotes. I found it on page 76 of Ford's collection /A Thicket
of Sky/ (Homestead House, 1961). 

 

The Image of Desire

 

We never knew when next the fox might strike,
But many a dark night lying in the loft
Straining our ears to catch the swift, the soft,
The cunning coming of him or his like,
We held a fortress as men hold a wake:
Silent and grim, bound to a solemn task
Which wasn't interrupted even to ask
The time; our boyhood honor was at stake.
And often when the cock crew, shaking fire
Out of the morning and the misty mow,
We stayed on, staring, hard put to leave off--
Lest in the wood the image of desire
Spring up behind us yapping, although now
We know we've kept this vigil long enough.

 

Given that Kinbote quotes from the poem in 1959, we must assume (within the
fictional world of the novel) that he saw it in a magazine or newspaper
somewhere--though not one indexed in the Reader's Guide or Humanities
Index, both of which I've checked.  The acknowledgments page gives the
following list of publications where poems therein were first published:

 

Arkansas Democrat, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal,
Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Compass Review, Cooperative
Consumer, Denver Post, Epos, Good Housekeeping, Kaleidograph, Kansas City
Star, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, New York Herald Tribune, New York
Times, Ozarks Mountaineer, Pegasus, Rotarian, Springfield Daily News,
University of Kansas City Review, Voices, Washington Star, Western
Humanities Review, and Yankee.

 

Of those, I would naturally look to the New York papers as the most likely
place, though I haven't looked yet.

 

As to deeper implications within PF, one might say that the poem is about
the ways we try to make real what we most desire. The cock crowing is a
signal that the "image of desire" has not (will not) appear, and what
follows is a testament to how reluctant we sometimes are to give that
desire up, especially when our desires have made the image almost
palpable.  In that sense, then, the poem relates very much to Kinbote, who
wants so badly to see Zembla in Shade's poem.  He is, in a sense, the boy
in the loft and Zembla is the fox that never appears.  The final line--
"We've kept this vigil long enough"--may point to Kinbote's recognition
that the Zembla will never appear. He is beginning to lose hope, as we seen
in his very next note (to l. 609-614), wherein he sees himself as the dying
exile in the inn.

 

Happily,
Matthew Roth