THOUGHTS
1.
Past
mention of the juniper tree in the quad, and Ronnie Knox’s memorable limerick,
led me to skim through his “Let Dons Delight”. Because it was described
“as
variations on a theme in an Oxford common-room: a mildly fantastical series of
reveries of incidents dreamed by a sleeping don from 1588 to 1938 at periods of
50 years”, published in 1939 and re-issued in 1958, I thought VN might perhaps
have echoed it among his barking, biting dons in PF. Apart from a faint
resonance in one of the dons commenting that his reverie had been interrupted
when, through a window, “selections from the music of Snow White were pouring in, reproduced
in a very raucous manner by an undergraduate’s gramophone …. It marked the
familiar point at which external reality begins to invade our dreams”, it seemed
too
2.
With MR drawing the
list’s attention to E. Darwin’s "Loves of the Plants: A Poem with Philosophical
Notes", I was struck by the coincidental mention, on another list, of another
long C18th poem, Henry Baker's (1698-1774) "The
Universe - A Poem Intended to Restrain the Pride of Man " and its reference to
the butterfly as a symbol of salvation:
How Glorious
now! How chang'd since Yesterday!
When on the Ground, a crawling Worm
it lay,
Where ev'ry Foot might
tread its Soul away.
Who rais'd it thence? And bid it range the
Skies?
Gave its rich Plumage, and its brilliant Dyes?
'Twas God: - It's
God and thine, O Man, and He
In this thy Fellow-Creature lets Thee
see,
The wond'rous Change
which is ordain'd for Thee. (ll. 430-437)
3.
Recently
quoted: Author Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1969 New
York Times interview that "there should exist a special typographical sign
for a smile--some sort of concave mark, a supine round
bracket." Am I alone in finding this apparent
advocacy of sign language by a master of the written word slightly sad? Perhaps
VN was merely reflecting that some of his readers seemed unable to tell when he
was joking.
4.
JF asked: What language is "Kongs-skugg-sio" supposed to be,
Zemblan? This language is Danish/Norwegian. Konungs Skuggsja is Swedish. The expression might be
translated King’s Shadow - ? The sio/sja element is slightly obscure: perhaps
shadow-play, shadow-world, phantasmagoria, reflection,
mirror.
Charles