Dear All,

Having applied my mind to the problem, let me provide a closely-reasoned  
and succinct solution:
Old McNab used that particular noun, "pond" -- because he needed a rhyme  
for "blond".

Hugs and kisses,

Tom (Rymour)

PS: I challenge anyone to form an anagram from either word.

> Matt Roth [responding to: Gary Lipon [ to Jansy's "Why a pastiche of  
> Hazel's tragedy, along with other sad tales? Why Hazel, in  
> particular..."]  I'm honestly quite surprised, if I understand you  
> correctly, that you don't see allusions to Hazel's story in this  
> sequence? JM: No! At least, not from this sequence...]  I'm firmly with  
> Gary on this one. As I think I said before, it is unimaginable to think  
> that Shade could concoct a young dead woman--who died on a "wild march  
> night"--standing by the edge of a pond, without having Hazel in mind.  
> Recall that Hazel died by drowning, probably in March, on a "night of  
> blow," and later on in Canto Three, while clearly thinking of Hazel's  
> death, Shade writes, "It is the wild / March wind. It is the father with  
> his child." My Mathilda association is pretty speculative, while this  
> connection, right there in the text, seems ironclad to me.
>
> JM: I almost gave up my retort, humbled by my blindness about anything  
> as obvious, like both Lipon and Roth find it to be, in Shade's lines  
> related to Hazel.
> A "wild March wind" seems to be the only real link to the night when  
> Hazel was swamped. And not even this one convinces me. Nor the parent's  
> worrying about a twenty-three year old daughter (23 if I remember former  
> calculations) out after midnight on her first (?) blind-date, lest their  
> protectiveness is revelatory of Hazel's mental disturbances.
> Lipon's analogies* remain a puzzle. Pond= swamp?
> A pond's reflective surface "full of a dreamy sky"...indicate a wild  
> March windy night?  I simply don't get it.
> Hazel as Shade's dream-wife?  Oh, please...
> What has been written about Hazel as "Mother Time" and the watchman by  
> the lake described as "Father Time"?
>
> In Zembla we find  Nabokov's Pale Fire and the Romantic Movement (with  
> special reference to the Brocken, Scott and Goethe) by Gerard de Vries
> when he quotes: "It is only Lochanhead...must think it....queer/ To stop  
> without a farmhouse near/ Between the woods and frozen lake/ The darkest  
> evening of the year." and he adds that these are "lines borrowed from  
> the second stanza of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowing  
> Evening," a poem alluded to in Pale Fire."
> This reference complicates matters even further: Why use Frost's lines  
> on "the darkest evening of the year," in relation to Hazel's stop at  
> Lochanhead? Why skip Shade's disbelief in IPH's revelations and try to  
> evaluate his own non-Oedipic fantasies for what's worth?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> * -He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both
> Jealous of one another. [1:Shade, Sybil & Hazel]
> Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife
> Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond
> Full of a dreamy sky.  [2:Sybil & Hazel, pond=swamp]
> Know of the head-on crash which on a wild
> March night killed both the mother and the child?
> [5:Pete Dean, Sybil and Hazel]
> .....................................
> Know of the head-on crash which on a wild
> March night killed both the mother and the child?
> [5:Pete Dean, Sybil and Hazel]