CK: If there is any evidence that Shade's relationship with his daughter was unnatural, I have missed it. I have missed how Hazel is either a nightingale (they don't exist on the American continent after all) or a pheasant. Shade is not a waxwing, but the shadow of one, which is only his poetic way of saying that he was watching  when a waxwing flew into his window; he could see the bird, whose shadow presumably fell on the poet, but the bird only saw the reflected sky. Sybil is an Irondell, so I suppose she could be said to be a swallow. Sylvia too has avian traits - she is said to perch in between peregrinations. Shade imagining himself a king is too generic an idea to point to the Ovid story ... so Matt is going to have to defend this idea - I just don't get it.

Carolyn