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 [ ] Because of its difficulty
in English, very few American writers have attempted to write in the
form [...] Some of the poets who used terza rima rhyme
patterns in English were G.Chaucer, Percy B.Shelley, Robert
Browning 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).
As I see it there's a striking link between
Frost's poem and John Shade's Pale Fire, through Thomas Hardy
and Charles Kinbote.
Shade's lines about "the svelte/ Stilettos of a frozen stillicide,"*
indicate Thomas Hardy's "Friend Beyond' and here's 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) Although Kinbote names Hardy (so he is not the
incognito prompter) it seems that the reference to "frost" (where I
underlined Kinbote's notes) is as subdued as it is full of praise to
his achievement.**
..............................................................................................
* Brian Boyd in "Nabokov's Pale
Fire, the Magic of Artistic Discovery" (notes to pages 213-224)
mentions that "Shade and Nabokov, so sensitive to rhymes, may draw
attention to the rhyme-word here in tribute to Hardy's poem, where
"stillicide" is also a rhyme-word and where the whole poem is in the
difficult terza rima, in appropriate homage to the form Dante
used in the Divine Comedy."
** -According to Paul D. Morris in
"Vladimir Nabokov, Poetry and the Lyric Voice" "Nabokov's preference
for iambic meters is revealed to have been shared with his fellow
émigré poets [...] On the few occasions when Nabokov departed from
exactitude in rhyme, he did so in the achievement of specific effects.
With regard to the stanza, Nabokov is demonstrated to have been an
exceptionally stanzaic poet with a marked preference for the rhyming
AbAb quatrain, although other categories from couplets to terza
rima were also employed"