Lines 34-35:  Stilettos of a frozen stillicide

How persistently our poet evokes images of winter in the beginning of a poem which he started composing on a balmy summer night!  The mechanism of the associations is easy to make out (glass leading to crystal and crystal to ice) but the prompter behind it retains his incognito.  One is too modest to suppose that the fact that the poet and his future commentator first met on a winter day somehow impinges here on the actual season.  In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word.  My dictionary defines it as “a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop.”  I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy.  The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop.  We should also note the cloak-and-dagger hint-glint in the “svelte stilettos” and the shadow of regicide in the rhyme.