Cp. with Shade's PF: "Then you turned and offered me/ ²⁶⁰   A thimbleful of bright metallic tea."

and to CK's notes: "What satisfaction to see him take, like reins from between his fingers, the long ribbon of man’s life and trace it through the mystifying maze of all the wonderful adventure.... The crooked made straight. The Daedalian plan simplified by a look from above — smeared out as it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line."  because, when Daedalus and his labirynth is mentioned close to a simplifier's thumb, I think of thimbles ("dedal" in Portuguese, here related to "finger") and about the similarity bt. its labyrithine irregularities and the maze of fingerprints ( I once posted about it in the VN-L). ]**

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* Lest we forget J.Shade's lines: " My fingernails and vaguely am aware / Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb,/ Our grocer’s son; the index, lean and glum/     College astronomer Starover Blue .."  and CK's notes to line 627: "Presumably, permission from Prof. Blue was obtained but even so the plunging of a real person, no matter how sportive and willing, into an invented milieu where he is made to perform in accordance with the invention, strikes one as a singularly tasteless device, especially since other real-life characters, except members of the family, of course, are pseudonymized in the poem./ This name, no doubt, is most tempting. The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover (accented, incidentally, on the ultima), that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. "blue." This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube. So it goes. Honest Starover Blue will probably be surprised by the epithet bestowed upon him by a jesting Shade. The writer feels moved to pay here a small tribute to the amiable old freak, adored by everybody on the campus and nicknamed by the students Colonel Starbottle, evidently because of his exceptionally convivial habits. After all, there were other great men in our poet’s entourage — For example, that distinguished Zemblan scholar Oscar Nattochdag."