Dear all
Many thanks for your help.
I had completely overlooked one of the horseshoes as a solution because Shade can only hear them - see Kinbote's note to the line - so it seems incongruous to have a visual image describing something Shade can't see. But perhaps the different noise "clunk"
suggests how that particular horseshoe has landed - sparking the visual image for Shade, so that I was being rather unimaginative in my reading.
The alternative of Sybil's shadow did occur to me, but the part that hits the tree would look as straight as the tree, so I discounted it.
But thanks to all!
Barrie Akin
On 16 Mar 2013, at 23:49, "Nabokv-L" <
nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
> There were several other replies that tendered the same insights already included in these; I posted (I hope) all that added a unique nuance or perspective on the line. Many thanks to all who submitted their interpretations.
>
> ~SB
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