Prestidigitated Poetry/Nabokovian Prose

            In Nabokov's 1944 poem, The Poem, one could say that we begin to see the initial aesthetically-tuned"throbs" of language that would eventually manifest themselves into Lolita. The poem works in a similar style to Lolita; using rhyming, doubling language, playing heavily (and possibly cruelly) with the reader's expectations, and possibly even illustrates the shadowy purpose of the poetically elusive Lolita (albeit in much more clear and direct language, aided by the interpretive mode of poetry).

           But even before we are given "the poem" that is promised by the title--The Poem--Nabokov first plays the game of telling us every type of poem that "the poem" is not.

                        Not the sunset poem you make when you think
                                                           aloud,
                        with its linden tree in India ink
                        and the telegraph wires across its pink
                                                             cloud;

                        not the mirror in you and her delicate bare
                        shoulder still glimmering there;
                        not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme--
                        the tiny music that tells the time;

                        and not the pennies and weights on those
                        evening papers piled up in the rain;
                        not the cacodemons of carnal pain;
                        not the things you can say so much better in plain
                                   prose--

           Nabokov here in these opening stanzas dually edifies and mystifies the reader; clearly (yet ironically) stating what "the poem" is not by poetically creating the recognizable shadow and sound of line that seems to be a poem--using the captivating imagery and rhetorical tricks of the trade; but, as he repetitiously reminds us--these are not The Poem. Nabokov creates tension with every poem that is not; poking fun at what is not while simultaneous showing his almost effortless mastery of the various archetypical forms.

           The end of The Poem seems to land just in time before the reader's patience drifts away, but the duplicitous enchantment it creates rings with an uncanny, unknowably understandable tone.

                         but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown,
                         --when you wait for the splash of the stone,
                         deep below, and grope for your pen,
                         and then comes the shiver, and then--

                         in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
                         the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds
                         fuse and form a silent, intense,
                         mimetic pattern of perfect sense.

            The Poem, for Nabokov, is an ideal to which he thoroughly describes: a divine, heaven-sent, intuitive "throb," transcended into tangled, deceptive, hidden, natural words, both "silent, intense," and yet perfectly attuned and reflective of the beauty in nature and the natural world.