“How
mobile is the bed on these
nights
of gesticulating trees
when
the rain clatters fast,
the
tin-toy rain with dapper hoof
trotting
upon an endless roof,
traveling
into the past.”— Russian-born American novelist-memoirist-poet
Vladimir
Nabokov (1899-1977), “Rain,” in The Portable Nabokov, edited by Page
Stegner (1971)
This
has been an unusually rainy season. I can’t begin to tell you the number of
times, in the wee hours of the morning, I’ve awakened to hear rain on the roof.
Nabokov—much
better known, of course, for his scandalous novel Lolita—demonstrates here his facility with a different genre:
poetry. I wonder how his work might have turned out if he had pursued poetry as
avidly as the novel—or, for that matter, collecting and classifying
butterflies?
(I
took the attached photo of this rain-slicked street while on vacation nearly three months ago at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.)
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