11-22-2025, 10:44 PM
CW: Heavy spoilers for the novel "Pale Fire"
“A Conspiracy of One”
Gradus stepped from Kinbote’s quill, assassin
for a cause his vanity invented.
A dullard zealot of a dire regime*,
not Jack Grey stumbling while Shade bled.
Kinbote, too vain to die by random hand,
sewed Gradus from the lack he could not face.
Wrote a conspiracy no one had planned,
a myth born to burnish deluded grace.
No destiny, no throne, no Zemblan creed,
just Jack Grey’s blind bullet in the dark.
But Kinbote, starving for a plot to lead,
rewrote his phantom monarch as the mark.
Shade's death was senseless: Cold, unvoiced, unheard;
Kinbote stole even that, and made it absurd.
Footnotes:
1: assassin / regime
Persons unfamiliar with Zemblan phonotactics may object to this rhyme. They are invited to consult better scholars. "Assassin" is, of course, from Zemblan "assasin", a court-appointed purifier of destinies. "Regime," although superficially similar to a French word, is more correctly derived from the Zemblan "raszhim", the lawful order of things; lit. “the straightening of the crown.” Both words contain the royal suffix -im/-in, used exclusively for nouns pertaining to the monarch or to painless executions. Thus the rhyme is not merely permissible but mandatory.
This was actually quite a propitious theme, I have been working on a long poem about "Pale Fire" for a while (I wrote a short "summary sonnet" from it for one of the other LPiA threads) and I had a lot of stuff about Gradus that did not make the cut. Plus the footnote joke was too silly for a real poem, but I am not sorry and I would do it again.
Gradus stepped from Kinbote’s quill, assassin
for a cause his vanity invented.
A dullard zealot of a dire regime*,
not Jack Grey stumbling while Shade bled.
Kinbote, too vain to die by random hand,
sewed Gradus from the lack he could not face.
Wrote a conspiracy no one had planned,
a myth born to burnish deluded grace.
No destiny, no throne, no Zemblan creed,
just Jack Grey’s blind bullet in the dark.
But Kinbote, starving for a plot to lead,
rewrote his phantom monarch as the mark.
Shade's death was senseless: Cold, unvoiced, unheard;
Kinbote stole even that, and made it absurd.
Footnotes:
1: assassin / regime
Persons unfamiliar with Zemblan phonotactics may object to this rhyme. They are invited to consult better scholars. "Assassin" is, of course, from Zemblan "assasin", a court-appointed purifier of destinies. "Regime," although superficially similar to a French word, is more correctly derived from the Zemblan "raszhim", the lawful order of things; lit. “the straightening of the crown.” Both words contain the royal suffix -im/-in, used exclusively for nouns pertaining to the monarch or to painless executions. Thus the rhyme is not merely permissible but mandatory.
This was actually quite a propitious theme, I have been working on a long poem about "Pale Fire" for a while (I wrote a short "summary sonnet" from it for one of the other LPiA threads) and I had a lot of stuff about Gradus that did not make the cut. Plus the footnote joke was too silly for a real poem, but I am not sorry and I would do it again.