Internal rhyme and off-rhyme (initial and end: Retake, flake medial: snow, slow dark, larches) and assonance ( flake / Shapeless, opaque) accumulate towardįor all his peculiarities, Kinbote will prove to have a deep passion for poetry and a fine ear for verbal music, and will often single out for special delectation Shade's ability to counterpoint sound and sense. Shade still stresses sight, but sharpness fades to shapelessness, opacity, dullness, paleness, abstractness, neutrality, so that like Keats compensating for the darkness of stanza 5 of "Ode to a Nightingale" by steeping it in smell, he now turns ![]() Retake the falling snow: each drifting flakeĪ dull dark white against the day's pale whiteĪnd abstract larches in the neutral light. The next verse paragraph seems to gaze in the same direction but blinks to a different beat: ![]() It apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse" (27). This is major poetry, by any standard, fully justifying Kinbote's awe at the end of the Foreword as he watches "John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking Real and imagined, between life and the hint of something beyond life in the "reflected sky," to create a sustained tension throughout the poem between the taken-for-granted, the freshly seen, the vividly projected,Īnd the unseen beyond. The contrast between the mundaneness of Shade's room-"Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate"-and the magic of the reflection reflects in turn off those other contrasts already intimated between ![]() Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glassĬovered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so John Shade's "Pale Fire" opens with an extraordinary series of images whose initial impact lingers in the mind as it expands in implication throughout the poem:Īs we learn more about Shade's lifelong attempt to understand a world where life is surrounded by death, we realize the full resonance of these opening lines: that he is projecting himself in imagination into the waxwing, as if it were somehow stillįlying beyond death, and into the reflected azure of the window, as if that were the cloudlessness of some hereafter, even as he stands looking at "the smudge of ashen fluff" of the dead bird's little body.Īlvin Kernan comments that the bird "has died flying into the hard barrier of the image which promises freedom but only reflects the world it is already in," and that irony persists:
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