Reconsidering Shade's chapter about IPH,
at which the poet had been hired as a lecturer, I was led to imagine
that John Shade must have been as prepared to
discourse on the Hereafter as any Buddhist, Freudian fish or communist
ideologue - unless the seriousness of his enterprise should derive from his
poetic genius and critical acumen in relation to other writers's immortal
writings.
Kinbote relates Shade's coinage of the word iridule to a Zemblan "peacock herl", "alder" and
to "strange nacreous dreams," thereby leading the reader away from the
original rainbow-transparency towards the satiny gleam of a
sea-shell.
As an American poet Shade was linked to his childhood
experiences in New Wye, not to Russian or Zemblan reminiscences and
landscape. His literary Parnassus was
different from Vladimir Nabokov's to whom an iridule* could serve as a reference to Pushkin's
voice, if one remembers that (according to Field) in the Russian
Parnassus "Pushkin is a rainbow over all the
land"?
........................................................
*... and that rare
phenomenon
The iridule-when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above
a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of
a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been
staged-