Restoration

The poem, Restoration, deals with some very similar themes to those of Lolita. The first lines, "To think that any fool may tear/ by chance the web of when and where" sound as if they describe Humbert Humbert. The entire "memoir" is HH attempting to change "the web of when and where." We know that he is a not entirely trustworthy narrator, but we must also take him at his word because his word is all we have. What we definitely do know, is that the story probably does not take the trajectory he tells us.

The third stanza, too, reads as if describing Lolita and HH. "My little daughter wakes in tears:/ She fancies that her bed is drawn/ into a dimness which appears/ to be the deep of all her fears/ but which, in point of fact, is dawn." This sound like it could be describing any night HH and Lolita are together. She is sad and scared, but HH thinks she is misguided. He believes himself to be the "dawn," and her fears are misplaced/unnecessary.

In the final stanza, in true Humbertian form, effectively says he will fuck the world: "So I would unrobe,/ turn inside out, pry open, probe/ all matter, everything you see,/ the skyline and its saddest tree,/ the whole inexplicable globe,/ to find the true, the ardent core." The only way to get to the truest true, that "ardent core," is to unrobe and "probe all matter."