In the otherwise empty, and pretty fatuous, obituary mentioned in my notes to lines 71-72, there happens to be quoted a manuscript poem (received from Sybil Shade) which is said to have been “composed by our poet apparently at the end of June, thus less than a month before our poet’s death, thus being the last short piece that our poet wrote.”
Here it is:
THE SWING
The setting sun that lights the tips
Of TV’s giant paperclips
Upon the roof;
The shadow of the doorknob that
At sundown is a baseball bat
Upon the door;
The cardinal that likes to sit
And make chip-wit, chip-wit, chip-wit
Upon the tree;
The empty little swing that swings
Under the tree: these are the things
That break my heart.
I leave my poet’s reader to decide whether it is likely he would have written this only a few days before he repeated its miniature themes in this part of the poem. I suspect it to be a much earlier effort (it has no year subscript but should be dated soon after his daughter’s death) which Shade dug out from among his old papers to see what he could use for Pale Fire (the poem our necrologist does not know).