Line 70:  The new TV

 

After this, in the draft (dated July 3), come a few unnumbered lines that may have been intended for some later parts of the poem.  They are not actually deleted but are accompanied by a question mark in the margin and encircled with a wavy line encroaching upon some of the letters: 

 

There are events, strange happenings, that strike

The mind as emblematic.  They are like

Lost similes adrift without a string,

Attached to nothing.  Thus that northern king,

Whose desperate escape from prison was

Brought off successfully only because

Some forty of his followers that night

Impersonated him and aped his flight—

 

He never would have reached the western coast had not a fad spread among his secret supporters, romantic, heroic daredevils, of impersonating the fleeing king.  They rigged themselves out to look like him in red sweaters and red caps, and popped up here and there, completely bewildering the revolutionary police.  Some of the pranksters were much younger than the King, but this did not matter since his pictures in the huts of mountain folks and in the myopic shops of hamlets, where you could buy worms, ginger bread and zhiletka blades, had not aged since his coronation.  A charming cartoon touch was added on the famous occasion when from the terrace of the Kronblik Hotel, whose chair lift takes tourists to the Kron glacier, one merry mime was seen floating up, like a red moth, with a hapless, and capless, policeman riding two seats behind him in a dream-slow pursuit.  It gives one pleasure to add that before reaching the staging point, the false king managed to escape by climbing down one of the pylons that supported the traction cable (see also notes to lines 149 and 171).

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