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The Poem

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 --

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 leaf-like insects, the eye-spotted birds
fuse and form a silent, intense,
mimetic pattern of perfect sense.

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in a rich and influential aristocratic family. His grandfather was Minister of Justice in Russia. His father, criminologist Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, has also been involved in publishing and politics. His mother is Elena Ivanovna. Nabokov has two brothers and two sisters. His childhood and adolescence spent in St. Petersburg where he published his first poem collection in 1916. To escape the Russian Revolution, in 1917 his family fled to Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. However, like many other Russian emigrants, his family headed to Berlin, Nabokov, along with his brother, enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge University, England. There from 1919 to 1922 he study natural sciences, Russian and French literature. During the last year of his studies, his father died in an attempt to prevent the political murder of Pavel Miliyukov. In 1923 Nabokov followed his family to Berlin. There he worked as a private teacher, translator, actor and poetry, as well as his first novel . In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, who is also a Russian emigrant. In 1937 he ran with his wife, a Jew, and his son Dmitry (born 1934) in France. In 1940, the family, fleeing the advancing German troops, moved to the United States where Nabokov was originally appointed as a butterfly expert in the New York Museum of Natural History. That same year he wrote his first English-language work, "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight". He soon began his academic career, leading him to Stanford University, Wales College, Harvard University, and finally to Cornell University, where in 1948 he offered his professorship of European and Russian literature. Since 1945, he has been an American citizen. The means brought to him by the Lolita novel (1955) allowed Nabokov to withdraw from his profession in 1959 and to concentrate on his creative work. In 1961, he moved with his wife to Montreux, Switzerland. He died of a viral infection on 2 July 1977 in Lausanne and was buried in Veve. Nabokov is a synesis and describes aspects of synesthesia in several of his works.