In a message dated 4/30/2010 3:18:40 PM Central Daylight Time, jansy@AETERN.US writes:
*- Like Stadlen, I was also taken in by the way Hochard inserted Carolyn's name in the middle of his posting - and this is why I attributed to Carolyn a reference to Maar and a quote from Transparent Things (they were Hochard's). I thought he'd been initially quoting her lines!
**- From Shade's lines: "And now a silent liner docks, and now/ Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough/ Old Zembla’s fields where my gray stubble grows,/ And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose."
*** - Wiki explains that the pun on "tub," following Alexander Pope's observation, considers that the tub "was a common term for a Dissenter's pulpit, and a reference to Swift's own position as a clergyman." and that Marat was killed in his tub a only a few years before Pope and Swift themselves died . My connection (Pope,Swift, Marat) is too forced, alas.
Shade specifically (and ironically) mentions Marat (l. 894), and he alludes, not to Pope's "Zembla" (apparently a reference to Nova Zembla as an ultima Thule in "An Essay on Man"), but to "old" Zembla, meaning that he is referring to Kinbote's Zembla. Other than the stricken lines about the escape of the "northern king," Shade is perhaps making a small (a very small) nod to Kinbote here, to whom he has been listening for a long time. Does this mean that he is morphing into Kinbote? I think not. It is hard for a poet to get some persistent voices out of his mind when he is trying to concentrate on other things, in this case an autobiographical poem.
That said, Swift's "tub" may well be both a boat and a pulpit, but it is assuredly not a bathtub!
Lines 931-38 may be ambiguously metaphoric in only the last two lines. The rest is Shade ranging outward imaginatively from "the country of my cheek" to the nearby highways and hilly roads, to ocean liners, to tourists disembarking in a foreign land. Maybe he, like me, sometimes likes to stick his big toe up the tap ("now a silent liner docks"). He's already told us (l. 893) that he uses his toe to regulate the warmth of the bath.
Lebanon was deeply troubled in the second half of 1958 (shortly before this poem takes place). U. S. Army and Marine forces landed in Beirut. About six months later (the time of the poem's composition), the crisis has passed, and tourism had resumed. Perhaps this is what Shade is alluding to in that remark on "sunglassers."
I can't see Shade's lines as much more than amusingly whimsical, just as the passage that comes before it catalogs a personal list of "evil" things. I don't much like swimming pools myself, and bullfighting has little attraction. As a matter of fact, I dislike most of the same things that Shade/Nabokov dislikes. Maybe the reason why I daily shop at Market Basket is that there's no music!
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