When I was teaching literature, I told my class that to have truly read a poem, one must read it three times. The first, to let the feeling and imagery of the text wash over the reader without stressing about meaning. The second, to look for meter and rhyme and to look up any words or references with which one is unfamiliar. And finally, for meaning, finding the source of feeling in that first read in the form and analysis of the second.
Now, to any former students who may have happened upon the “The Man of Tomorrow’s Lament,” a poem Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov tried and failed to sell to the New Yorker in 1942 which finally published in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, I must apologize. There is no reason anyone should read this poem more than once, as it is a straightforward rhyming couplet situation that is 100 percent just an early exploration of the harmful erection that would later become the theme of Lolita.
Thirteen years before publishing Lolita, when Nabokov had recently immigrated to New York City and was struggling to write in a new language and do the freelance hustle I know so well, he used his son’s newfound interest in Superman as inspiration for a poem about how the Man of Steel can’t do anything about that flinty boner. It is, and I know I will get shit for saying this, very fucking bad. But come on:
“I’m young and bursting with prodigious sap,