Stan Kelly-Bootle. "I
suspect VN may also be punning on the slang meaning of ‘hock’ = ‘pawn.’ Later
your goods are REDEEMED = returned to you, by paying back the
loan...[ ] There are fanciful ditties where the object being pawned
is one’s heart or dream. VN’s ‘Our Lady’s Tears’ falls into this
category.
Jansy Mello: A
friend of mine inquired about what "Our Lady of Tears" indicated. I
offered him a few words from Brian Boyd's comment [ ..." the aura of snobbishness and hyperlucre that surrounds Baron Demon Veen
and is reinforced here with the Lord Byron and Lady (even if she's of a
different provenance..." ]* However, a lazy carnival Sunday and
the news of a Papal resignation led me to the
Virgin Mary and following this train of associations I first
reached Lolita and next, Ada, where
there are references to Swinburne's long "Our Lady of Pain," about a
Dolores that's certainly unredeemed. (Cf. "Eros
qui prend son essor! Arts that our marblery harbors: Eros, the rose and
the sore,’ I am ill at these numbers, but e’en rhymery is easier ‘than confuting
the past in mute prose.’ Who wrote that? Voltimand or Voltemand? Or the Burning
Swine? A pest on his anapest! ‘All our old loves are corpses or wives.’ All our
sorrows are virgins or whores. " (ADA, p.288).
. However, there
were no explicit references to tears in JAS's verse, only to the
sorrows of a priest's Virgin - so I fear
that my connections went astray.**
Jorio Dauster, in his turn, searched about
the wines, Lacryma Christi and Liebfrauenmilch, that
might have been hidden behind Our Lady's Tears"*** . Our results
were equally inconclusive. A few lines later (and I realize that Ada is referred
to as a "half-Russian
child") Demon exclaims: ‘Vous me comblez,’
said Demon in reference to the
burgundy, ‘though’ pravda, my maternal grandfather would have left the
table rather than see me drinking red wine instead of champagne with
gelinotte."
Sometimes a Nabokov wine,
cigar or wordplay is only a cigar or
a wordplay...
...............................................................
*Checking on Lady Byron (wikipedia):
Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron (17
May 1792 – 16 May 1860) was the wife of the poet Lord Byron, and mother of Ada
Lovelace, the patron and co-worker of mathematician Charles Babbage....
** Dolores, by
Algernon Charles Swinburne (other comments are found in old VN-L
postings)
(:excerpts from the first two
verses and those that offer a direct link to Ada and to
infertility).
"Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
Hard eyes that grow
soft for an hour;
[..............................]..
What shall rest of
thee then, what remain,
O mystic and sombre Dolores,
Our Lady of
Pain?
Seven sorrows the priests
give their Virgin;
But thy sins, which are seventy times seven,
Seven ages
would fail thee to purge in,
And then they would haunt thee in
heaven":
.[...........................]
..
And those that are a direct
link to ADA and to infertility:
"....Time turns the old days
to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives;
And marriage and death and
division
Make barren our lives."
*** - (from Google
sources): "The original German spelling of the word is Liebfrauenmilch, given to
the wine produced from the vineyards of the Liebfrauenkirche or Church of Our
Lady in the Rhineland-Palatinate city of Worms since the 18th
century.[ ] Lacryma Christi's vines are grown on a
piece of land that, as legend tells, was stolen by Satan from Paradise
and made holy by the tears of Christ." (Satan/
Demon)