-------- Original Message --------
Sergei brought up Kinbote's reading of Shade's variant:
Poor old man Swift, poor ---, poor Baudelaire.
If, for Shade, "e" in Baudelaire is mute, then a name that fits
would be Kinbote. (As he hints.) If "e" is not mute, it would be Shade.
MR: This poet's ear definitely favors the iamb as the central foot in
that
line. Otherwise, one has to read "poor" as unstressed in the first and
third foot but stressed in the fourth foot--a highly unnatural
combination
that is very difficult to read. If, however, the middle foot is "poor
Shade," the line is perfectly balanced, including a nice chime
between "Poor old" and "poor Baud-". Moreover, it continues the
completely
iambic cadence of the stanza, with lovely caesurae at the end to
resolve
the chord.
As for line 501, it's not entirely unreasonable to read Rabelais as an
anapest. Shade doesn't resort to them very often, but they do exist in
the
poem--see, for example, the fourth foot of line 213. It would be more
definite if line 502 also ended with an anapest, but alas it's an iamb,
so
we can't look to any parallel structure as a hint.
I hope our editor will allow me to say that if we do read the ---
as "Shade," it bolsters theories of the novel that involve mental
difficulties for Shade.
Matt