Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze

The poem "Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze" is a lyrical cry of obsession and grief that Humbert Humbert composes during his search for Lolita after she vanishes from the Elphinstone hospital with Clare Quilty. It condenses the novel's central themes of possession, loss, and the fusion of desire with despair, and it stands as the most concentrated expression of Humbert's mania in the entire memoir.

Composition and Context

Humbert writes the poem during his stay in a Quebec sanatorium, after spending the winter and most of the following spring there, and before he resolves to proceed to California for a thorough search. He describes it as something he composed in his retreat, and later, by psychoanalyzing it, he notices it is really a maniac's masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers.

Structure and Content

The poem is a series of stanzas that alternate between a desperate address to the missing girl and a sardonic commentary on the speaker's own plight. It opens with the repeated line "Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze" and gives her physical description: hair brown, lips scarlet, age five thousand three hundred days, profession none or "starlet." The speaker asks where she is hiding and why, and he talks in a daze and walks in a maze. He asks what make is the magic carpet she is riding, whether a Cream Cougar is the present craze, and where she is parked. He asks who her hero is, still one of those blue-caped star-men, and recalls the balmy days and palmy bays, the cars, and the bars, his Carmen. The poem then shifts to a bitter celebration of McFate touring the States with a child wife, plowing his Molly in every state among the protected wild life. The speaker calls Dolly his folly, notes her eyes were vair and never closed when he kissed her, and asks if she knows an old perfume called Soleil Vert. The final stanzas turn to a French passage: "L'autre soir un air froid d'opéra m'alita: Son fé bien fol est qui s'y fie! Il neige, le décor s'écroule, Lolita! Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie?" Then the English returns: "Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse, I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying." The poem ends with a direct address to an officer, pointing out Dolores Haze and her lover, and a final repetition of the wanted notice, giving her weight as ninety pounds and her height as sixty inches. The speaker's car is limping, the last long lap is the hardest, and he shall be dumped where the weed decays, and the rest is rust and stardust.

Thematic Significance

The poem functions as a compressed version of the entire narrative's emotional arc. It juxtaposes the tender memory of Lolita's physical details with the corrosive hatred for her lover and the self-lacerating awareness of the speaker's own ruin. The repeated "Wanted, wanted" echoes the actual police notices Humbert saw in the Wace post office, including a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen, wearing brown shoes when last seen. The poem transforms that bureaucratic language into a personal incantation of loss. The French lines, which translate to "The other evening a cold air of opera put me to bed: He is quite mad who trusts in it! It snows, the scenery collapses, Lolita! Lolita, what have I done with your life?" directly confront the moral question that Humbert elsewhere evades. The final image of the car limping and the speaker being dumped where the weed decays, with the rest being rust and stardust, anticipates the novel's closing meditation on the only immortality Humbert and Lolita may share: the refuge of art.