In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his childhood and says that, as a little boy, he prayed for everybody to be always well:
A preterist: one who collects cold nests.
Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests.
Here, tucked away by the Canadian maid,
I listened to the buzz downstairs and prayed
For everybody to be always well,
Uncles and aunts, the maid, her niece Adéle
Who'd seen the Pope, people in books, and God. (ll. 79-85)
A Prayer for my Daughter is a poem by W. B. Yeats written in 1919, shortly after the birth of Yeats's daughter Anne and World War I. One of the poems that Yeats wrote in 1919 is entitled Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen. According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), John Shade and Sybil Irondell were married in 1919:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flower-girls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisers, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434). (note to Line 275)
The hazel wood and a hazel wand mentioned by Yeats in his poem The Song of Wandering Aengus (1899) brings to mind Shade's daughter Hazel (who was born in 1934). Hazel Shade's "real" name seems to be Nadezhda Botkin. After her tragic death her father, Professor Vsevolod Botkin, went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer). In Russian, nadezhda means "hope." In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of daughter and says that he thinks that she always nursed a small mad hope. In Shakespeare’s historical play Richard III (Act 5, scene 2) Richmond says:
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
The author of a book on surnames, Kinbote calls Shade's wife "Sybil Swallow," because he argues that her maiden name, Irondell, comes not from a little valley yielding iron ore but from the French for "swallow" (hirondelle). Lastochka being Russian for "swallow," the maiden name of Professor Botkin's wife seems to be Sofia Lastochkin. In Greek, Sophia means "wisdom." Wisdom is a poem of W. B. Yeats:
The true faith discovered was
When painted panel, statuary.
Glass-mosaic, window-glass,
Amended what was told awry
By some peasant gospeller;
Swept the Sawdust from the floor
Of that working-carpenter.
Miracle had its playtime where
In damask clothed and on a seat
Chryselephantine, cedar-boarded,
His majestic Mother sat
Stitching at a purple hoarded
That He might be nobly breeched
In starry towers of Babylon
Noah's freshet never reached.
King Abundance got Him on
Innocence; and Wisdom He.
That cognomen sounded best
Considering what wild infancy
Drove horror from His Mother's breast.
W. B. Yeats is the author of The Wisdom Of The King and The Coming Of Wisdom With Time:
THOUGH leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.