The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n From gen'ral excrement; each thing's a thief. from Timon of Athens(c.1607 – 08) William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

I come to Pale Fire in an odd way.

I have for a long while sought to revive
the practice of reciting poetry,
(especially when it comes to education,)
by demonstrating how one might combine
a voice recording, its text, and commentary,
all into one neat page of hypertext,
and then proceed to organize such things
into collections; wise anthologies
based upon a common theme or style,
and these eventually formed into lectures;
which then in turn could also be recorded
and melded[wedded] with the earlier recordings,
thus yielding a novel way of reading,
hearing, learning, speaking poetry;
or music lyrics; music itself perhaps,
illuminating its harmonic forms;
perhaps all art that unfurls over time.

Having access to a database
of such recordings lends a skeleton
of support for more reflective and nuanced,
personal uses of the human voice,
and all its various inflections,
as a rhetorical medium in
its own right, and with its own methods
and its own system of rewards.

The student/reader learns to see the poem
less as semantic puzzle, more as script,
and learns how to conceive interpretation:
the affectual world of the poem.
Instead of tiresome attempts to find
new meanings hidden somewhere on the page,
the student faces questions of his own
voice and self and role. Unwarranted
intrusion into the personal realm?

The classroom is a stage wherein performs
a teacher often speaking a dull script
on what it takes to read and compose well
and rarely showing how to enjoy it.

All the world's a stage, so says Jaques,
and also every day's routine encounters
with our fellow members of specie,
are always a rhetorical event
fraught with many possibilities,
dullness being just one. Harry Baily said:
 For trewely, confort ne myrthe is noon
 To ride by the weye doumb as a stoon;

Such systems with their close semantics helps
extend what we can wrap our minds about,
the modernist and his obscure allusions,
like Eliot and Stevens, even Frost.
But not just what is the purposely abstruse,
close sound and meanings help us all to muse
upon what is historically remote,
like Shakespeare, and dear Chaucer...

Indeed it is ideal for doing Chaucer,
in Middle English, and show he's not remote,
(when one is well equipped with the right aids).
And what we glean from such an exercise
is simply the original sound and use
of English poetry, which is to say,
of the heroic couplet, two rhyming lines
of five iambic feet, repeated, used
in ancient poetry for story telling.

I thought it might be useful to survey
more recent uses of heroic couplets,
such as My Last Duchess by Robert Browning,
or Adam's Curse by William Butler Yeats,
of course, The Tuft Of Flowers by Robert Frost.
These I came-to on my own accord
but Pale Fire came to me while perusing
the article in Wikipedia
about heroic couplets. And I felt,
after reading it, what an odd pair
of very dif'rent styles these two were.
Imagine how the two might sound together
the very modern and very old tongues
of Geoffrey Chaucer and of Vladimir
Nabokov!

But certainly it would be no small feat
in learning to recite his Pale Fire;
and all nine hundred ninty-nine odd lines;
And would it be worthwhile, after all,
the work required to bring things up to snuff:
Is Pale Fire the poem really good enough?

How should it be judged? often times I'd ask.
How has it been judged as a poem, per se?
Surprisingly the critics that I've read
seem to avoid all judgment on how well
or poorly the poem Pale Fire had been writ.

How should the poem be judged, coming to us
as it does as an accoutrement
of an enclosing novel; its germ seed perhaps,
but, either way, has little to do with the poem,
which stands well enough on its own.

Pale Fire the poem is almost a thousand
lines of verse cast in heroic couplets.
A traditionalist's delight: a tale.
But no one writes this kind of thing these days!
We struggle trying just to come to grips
with such an odd anachronism. What should
such a thing look like? How should it sound?
What pieces from that past should it be set
against? Of course there's My Last Duchess—
but this thing far surpasses that in length.

Is it, then, to be
taken seriously?
Seriously? What does this mean?
Are we asking: Is this truly meant to entertain?
The technical form and scope of the poem
argues convincingly for the desire to entertain.
It may be subtle, ironic, parody,
what matters most is does it entertain?

As for prosody, his style's assured,
mixing enjambment and caesurae so
as to break up the stream of five foot lines.
Like you're s'posed-to.
And the lines scan well throughout, with some
notable exceptions.


Nabokov's iambic verse sounds rather fussy,
fastidious, most line-endings demand
a distinct pause, even when they're enjambed.
And often words invert their standard accents.
Feminine line endings are infrequent.
All this conveys a kind of sturdiness,
and speeds the story towards its destination,
inexorably, like a throbbing engine.



[But] looking at the opening line
one is surprized to find
a rhythm similar to the opening
of Canterbury:



Note that all these lines have a weak, pyrrhic, third foot,
which yields a rhythm similar to a heart beat,
thump thump, pause, thump thump,
thump thump, pause, thump thump,
which makes the verse sound as if it were
written in four beat tetrameter,
a simpler and more basic rhythm,
stronger, that better proclaims the onset of verse.

Pale Fire begins with the common first foot inversion,
while Canterbury simply drops the first unaccented beat,
either way both begin on-the-beat. Again, this helps
subtly to gain the ear's attention.
(In English names there is a distinct preference for
the trochaic rhythm, as in Marcus Garvey,
which, of course, begin on the beat.
It sounds stronger than say Gillette MacDuff.
This is discussed in a Freakonomics blog entry at the New York Times.)

Shade/Nabokov continues to emphasize the initial beat.
Some might dispute the inversion of the first foot in line 3,
but I think it's correct if only because it maintains the pattern.
Either way, its worth noting how many of the opening lines
begin on a downbeat.



The fourth line even sets up a strong trochaic counter-rhythm.

Note the word Retake, beginning the second stanza or verse,
It's an imperative, meaning that its sentence has no subject,
although implicitly it is you, the reader.
In this form the word draws attention to itself,
and engages the reader by ordering him to do something strange,
to retake the falling snow. What does this mean?
make time run backwards? use our imagination?


Pale Fire, the poem, is an underappreciated, unknown even,
a true modern classic in its use of traditional poetic form
and technique.