Subject
Query: Frederic Myers' verse in "Vane Sisters"
Date
Body
I've been wondering if there is an interesting reading of the verse by
"Frederic Myers" in The Vane Sisters.
What is this - a conjurer's rabbit,
Or a flawy but genuine gleam -
Which can check the perilous habit
And dispel the dolorous dream?
Myers' presence in the story is comprehensible, since he was the author of
(the posthumously published!) Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily
Death. But what about the poem itself?. Is this poem a logogriph? I'm
also wondering whether anyone has tackled the wonderfully long sentence
that ends the sixth section (the one with Cook, garlic and ending with
uncooked liver.) Incidentally, one of the members of our Nabokov seminar
noted that in this passage with various (mostly unappetizing) food images,
there is a rather funny typo (manged for managed). It was corrected in
the recent collection edited by D. Nabokov and does not seem to have been
in the earlier editions. Quite a story to let a typo slip by.
"Frederic Myers" in The Vane Sisters.
What is this - a conjurer's rabbit,
Or a flawy but genuine gleam -
Which can check the perilous habit
And dispel the dolorous dream?
Myers' presence in the story is comprehensible, since he was the author of
(the posthumously published!) Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily
Death. But what about the poem itself?. Is this poem a logogriph? I'm
also wondering whether anyone has tackled the wonderfully long sentence
that ends the sixth section (the one with Cook, garlic and ending with
uncooked liver.) Incidentally, one of the members of our Nabokov seminar
noted that in this passage with various (mostly unappetizing) food images,
there is a rather funny typo (manged for managed). It was corrected in
the recent collection edited by D. Nabokov and does not seem to have been
in the earlier editions. Quite a story to let a typo slip by.