Dear Don, you wrote that you "got to wondering about that 'sublimated
grouse' ",  and you added that "in  my Freud-saturated society, 'sublimated'
= repressed, pushed  down into the subconscious". I wonder ( speaking about
"ill-understood") why Freud always gets the blame for any discrepancy in the
interpretation of symbols, names or poetic images. Freudian "sublimation"
doesn't  simply indicate a "repressed" material. This instinctual destiny
( sublimation is one of the "Triebschicksale") applies to a transformation
that is comparable to a chemical "sublimation".
Such a process might accomodate your interpretation of Shade's idea of " the
rather plain-looking grouse " turning into an "elegant, showy pheasant"
while, at the same time, it exempts us from finding in this a reference to
something "sublime".

 

In Shade's poem we find a description of "reading from left to right in
winter's code", that does not exactly describe writing in Chinese ( it might
be expected from the lines that state that this poor grouse found its native
China). The puzzle, for me, begins here already. After K's commentary aludes
to Sherlock Holmes this "side-tracking" tactic gets emphasized. As I see it,
we might find a "foreign" grouse which, only wishfully, became a "splendid
pheasant"...
Jansy