Matthew Roth found a Luna Moth motif in Edself Ford
and I must agree that "the poem doesn't strike me as altogether
wonderful; nor does it seem to resonate with much in PF. Having learned my
lesson, however, from "The Image of Desire," I checked the poem on the
facing page (68) ... Inquest for a Poet
We found him crumpled/ In the
door;/ He clutched a/ Silver key....Our search has not/ Turned up a lock/ That
opens to/ His key..
Matthew added: " I don't want to make too
much of this, for fear of seeming too indulgent of a desire to find KEYS
where none may exist. If I were indulgent, however, I might point to
"He clutched a / Silver key" as having a particular resonance with "still
clutching the inviolable shade"--the line from Arnold that Kinbote quotes
during his description of Shade's murder. But this is all rather
improbable...
At the end we find an [EDNOTE. The
significance of the poems on facing pages is interesting, considering the
novel's looking-glass logic and Kinbote's advice on how to read the commentary
vs. the poem. SES]
Feeling myself again floating against the
mainstream, like in the nursery rhyme Edsel Ford's little verses suggested
to my ears, I was reminded of
Mary Mary quite contrary,/How does your garden
grow?/ With silver bells and cockle shells/And pretty maids all in a row. The
associative mood can become deadly. These lines, recited for and by minute Brits
and after following a google-link, led me to Mary
Tudor, or Bloody Mary ( already discussed at our list in relation to "Ada").
The silver bells and cockle shells referred to were colloquialisms for
instruments of torture. The 'silver bells' were thumbscrews which crushed the
thumb between two hard surfaces by the tightening of a screw. The 'cockleshells'
were believed to be instruments of torture which were attached to the
genitals! The mechanical instrument (now known as the
guillotine) was called the Maiden - shortened to Maids in the Mary
Mary Rhyme.
So, I'll curb my contrariness lest I end-up
half-dead amidst metaphors and similes. And yet, it is still a source of
wonder, to me, why Nabokov seems to have given such an important place to
EdselFord's verses: wouldn't a few scattered allusions be enough?There are
Hardy's "trophies of the eaves" to quote (cf.Boyd and Michael
Long,1984, "Lone cave's stillicide" ) and oozes
of Frosts...
Shade himself (
apud Kinbote) wrote about "the shadow of the doorknob that/ At sundown is a
baseball bat/ Upon the door..."( note to line 61) in verses (yes!)
reminiscent of E.Ford's. Kinbote, discussing line 130, about
Shade who never swung a bat, writes about a spark in a key ( lights and shadows,
bats and keys) that causes a "wonderful conflagration to spread in the
prisoner's mind..", namely, " the bedside light was just strong enough
to put a bright gleam on the gilt key in the lock of the closed door.
And all at once that spark on that key..."
Freud and Goethe seemed to suggest that "a key
in the lock" indicates something similar to John Rea's find, in the
Webster, concerning bacon and bacon sandwich. An erotic key...
Jansy