R.S.Gwynn [ to JM's post on Nabokov's entomologic epiphanies] - I've always wondered about Frost's "one luminary clock against the sky" in "Acquainted with the Night," and wondered about VN's own clock, obviously heard when he was in residence in Cambridge 20 or so years later than RF. I can''t imagine that VN would have disliked the RF poem.

JM: Robert Frost's 'Acquainted With The Night,' "is written in strict iambic pentameter, with 14 lines like a sonnet, and with a terza rima rhyme scheme, which follows the complex pattern, aba bcb cdc dad aa[ ] Because of its difficulty in English, very few American writers have attempted to write in the form [...] Some of the poets who wrote with terza rima rhyme patterns in English were Chaucer, Shelley and Thomas Hardy. Among the 20th-century poets we find Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, Andrew Cannon, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, Clark Ashton Smith, James Merrill, Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur (still according to several wikipedia entries).

There is a striking link between Frost's poem and John Shade's Pale Fire, namely his lines about "the svelte/ Stilettos of a frozen stillicide," because among the poems that were presented as an example of terza rima we find Thomas Hardy's "Friend Beyond' (its four last lines are: "And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,/They’ve a way of whispering to me—fellow-wight who yet abide—/In the muted, measured note/Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave’s stillicide:" This is what Kinbote reveals about lines 34-35:"How persistently our poet evokes images of winter in the beginning of a poem which he started composing on a balmy summer night!...but the prompter behind it retains his incognito...In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as "a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop." I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop," thereby linking the two poets (Hardy and Frost) without emphasizing their excellence in terza rima.