LOLITA: Is the name Swinburne related
to "swine"? Later, in Ada, the link is made, thru the "Dolores" poem, but
as "Burning Swine", but there is a "weight-lifting swine" (G.Trapp) that
might be related to Dolores McCord's "weight-lifting champion" J.C.Heenan.
(I notice the slip of my pen in the
preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered
Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty.
I believe one of the ladies was a
disguised man [my static]. However — would there be a spare cot in 49,
Mr. Swine?
"I think it went to the Swoons," said
Swine, the initial old clown.
He was no longer the satyr
but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have
mentioned more than once, who used to counteract his "sprees" (he drank beer
with milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting**
ADA
... was that Percy de Prey? It was[...] he had
grown swine-stout.
Eros qui prend son essor! Arts that our marblery
harbors: Eros, the rose and the sore,’ I am ill at these numbers, but e’en
rhymery is easier ‘than confuting the past in mute prose.’ Who wrote that?
Voltimand or Voltemand? Or the Burning Swine? A pest on his
anapest! ‘All our old loves are corpses or wives.’ All our sorrows are
virgins or whores.
Darkbloom places "loves are corpses or wives" & Swinburne
p.288. all our old etc.:
Swinburne*.
.................................................................................................................
* - Dolores (by A. C. Swinburne)
excerpt:
Give me place,
even me, in their train,
O my sister, my spouse, and my
mother,
Our
Lady of Pain.
For the crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness,
the fruit thereof dust;
No thorns go as deep as a rose's,
And love is more
cruel than lust.
Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves
into corpses or wives;
And marriage and death and
division
Make
barren our lives.
**- Swinburne's lover,
Dolores/Adah: In New York she became a poetess and
the wife of Heavyweight Champion John C. Heenan. Her acting in Mazeppa
brought her fame.
........................................
BTW: In July 1, 1996, Joseph Piercy
(U.Wolverhampton) addressed the list:
Dear Nabokovians
Could
anybody help me with the following ?
1)
Lucette quotes (as told be the not
entirely reliable Vivian Darkbloom) a line
from
Algernon Swinburne in "Ada" : "All our old loves are
corpses or wives"
(penguin edition p288) does anybody know from which work
this quote
derives.
2) Did Nabokov ever comment/ write about Swinburne at
any point.
I am interested in this as Swinburne's elaborate alliterative
epithets
have a peculiar Nabokovian flavour. "Dolores" being a
fine example of
this.