In Pale Fire the world is divided into groups, and the principle of classification is aesthetic sensibility. Most readers agree that the poet rather than the critic occupies the apex in the novel's hierarchy. As the maker of "Pale Fire," Shade has the most highly developed capacity for achieving aesthetic bliss, reaching that place where art is the norm. To be sure, Kinbote has a capacity for creativity, but his art consists in colonizing the labor of others. And Gradus is wholly of the world, a grim functionary, recognizable to a gnostic as one of the hylicoi. Yet Shade, despite his relative distance from power politics, market economies, and erotic exploitation, finally is no Promethean of the imagination. He attempts in a rather clumsy way to integrate personal and universally human concerns into a poem that is essentially a life review, not unlike Krapp's. "Pale Fire," a poem complete with the real names, places, and dates that validate a personal narrative, is straightforward autobiography recounting the suicide of Shade's only daughter and his quest for an assurance of life after death--his "faint hope" for her and for himself. Most commentators have presumed that Shade's poem, as a creative performance that resists Kinbote and his motives, evinces Shade's success in escaping the prison-house in which criticism would incarcerate him. Yet Shade may not be as wildly inventive as many presume. There is a strong lexical connection between the poet and his killer: "shade" means "degree" as well as relative darkness (a gray color) and Gradus's aliases are Jack Degree and Jack de Grey--the color or "shade" of a shade. Kinbote's disappointed impression after removing the poem from Shade's dead body is accurate: "Instead of the wild glorious romance--what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style …" (p. 209). It seems unlikely that Nabokov would ask such a shopworn poetic form to serve his aesthetic and subversive purposes. In my view, Shade is still too utilitarian about art's contribution to life, and his gross employment of poetry is not yet aesthetic, alienistic, or Nabokovian.

Kinbote claims that Shade's poem is "beautifully written of course" (p. 209); but an "of course" from Kinbote might be a clue that the implied author of the novel does not concur with his pathologically egocentric character. And the prosodic tricks played on Shade by Nabokov belie Kinbote's cavalier puffery. These tricks, what we might call the jester bells of "Pale Fire," are made possible by Shade's use of a highly traditional verse form, the rhymed pentameter couplet. The rhymed or heroic couplet has an established, broadly recognized function in traditional English prosody, conforming to the shared expectations of poets and audiences since at least the sixteenth century. Nabokov gives Shade the conventional couplet form that Dryden selected for the weighty and politically important theme of Absalom and Achitophel, the form that Keats used in Endymion and the one Pope chose for An Essay on Man. Moreover, since the seventeenth century, pentameter couplets have been associated with the elegy, a form characterized by gravity, seriousness, and consistency. Inherent, then, in the prosody of "Pale Fire" is a tradition of treating matters of solemn significance, including death, immortality, and the justifica-tion of the ways of God in the world. But Nabokov knows well that the most formal poetic devices lend themselves to subversive satire as well as solemnity: Pope used the same heroic couplet form for his great mock-epic The Rape of the Lock, and Byron achieved a sudden "balloon prick" deflation in Don Juan, usually by a polysyllabic rhyme at the end of a stanza. By having Shade work in heroic couplets on an elegiac theme, Nabokov sets him up for a series of bathetic falls.

Shade characteristically begins his stanzas with a candor and sincerity appropriate to themes of high seriousness. The first lines of many stanzas guilelessly address matters of general human concern. But Shade's typical stanza evidences a shift as it proceeds from sincere artlessness to device-encrusted versifying. The harmony between manner and elegiac matter disappears. Since his theme remains consis-tently lofty throughout the individual stanzas and the poem, Shade's self-parody must be unintentional: One does not joke about a daughter's suicide.24 The collapse of artistic control by Shade, however, gives Nabokov the opportunity to practice his own virtuosity. He can parody Goldsmith and Wordsworth, show himself off as the equal of Pope and Byron, and at the same time distance himself from a this-worldly writer clumsily trying to mythologize his real-life experiences and heartfelt emotions.

Hence it is when Shade is most autobiographical, most concerned with transforming actual experiences into poetry, that Nabokov makes him most ludicrous. Describing his boyhood as a cripple, Shade writes:

Then as now
I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough,
Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat,
I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.
(ll. 127-130)

Asthmatic, lame and fat,
I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.
(ll. 129-30).

The collapse of our confidence in Shade's self-revelation stanza is typical of other crucial moments in "Pale Fire." The most important stanza thematically and autobiographically occurs at the close of "Canto Two" and concludes at the exact midpoint of the poem--line 500. Here Shade describes the suicide of his daughter, a personal tragedy that has naturally intensified his concern with the question of an afterlife. Hazel Shade's death is perhaps the poet's most important lyric impulse for the composition of "Pale Fire." The stanza begins with a general description of nature, a summing up that sets the general scene for a personal cataclysm:

It was a night of thaw, a night of blow,
With great excitement in the air. Black spring
Stood just around the corner, shivering
In the wet starlight and on the wet ground.
(ll. 494-497)

In the wet starlight and on the wet ground.
The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned.
(ll. 497-498)

A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank
Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.
(ll. 499-500)

Our confusion about what we are supposed to feel is intensified by the unsatisfying noun/verb closure of the canto in its unbalanced final couplet. Shade's choice of a verb to end the line that precisely breaks the poem into halves, the line that concludes both the last couplet in the stanza and the last stanza in the canto, is difficult to justify. According to George Amis, couplets rhymed noun/verb sound to the ear "more independent, and the couplet seems indecisively closed."25 The conventions of the form lead us to expect this stanza and the canto to achieve a dignified closure; in an elegy mourning the death of child, we expect the poet to bring the child's life to a humane and dignified end. But in "Pale Fire" both expectations are disappointed. If we take pleasure in the verse as Shade's poetry, it is the patronizing pleasure of watching a man fail grandly in a noble undertaking. After appealing to our common humanity at the beginning of his stanzas, Shade falls prey to our wit as he closes them off, unintentionally evoking a smirking embarrassment rather than sympathy.

Nabokov himself calls attention to the humorous potential of rhyme in his Notes on Prosody, part of his scholarly apparatus originally attached to Eugene Onegin. His depreciation of "fancy rhymes" in English poetry is invaluable for an analysis of Shade's poem. "In English," Nabokov says, "fancy rhymes or split rhymes are merely the jester bells of facetious verselets, incompatible with serious poetry." Hinting at what he means by "fancy rhymes," Nabokov says that "the Englishman Byron cannot get away with 'gay dens'--'maidens.'"26 And as the following selected rhymes indicate, Nabokov has undermined "Pale Fire's" elegiac serious-ness by his exotic rhyme pairs:

stillicide / nether side (ll. 35-36)

always well / her niece Adele (ll. 83-84)

my Triassic; green / Upper Pleistocene (ll. 153-54)

Age of Stone / my funnybone. (ll. 155-56)

would debate / Poetry on Channel 8. (ll. 411-12)

Maybe, Rabelais: / I.P.H., a lay (ll. 501-502)

the big G / peripheral debris (ll. 549-50)

in that state / hallucinate (ll. 723-24)

the gory mess / of prickliness (ll. 905-906)

does require / Will! Pale Fire. (ll. 961-62)

24. Shade's poetry is, of course, Nabokov's construction, and Nabokov uses it to parody what we might call the "low-Romantic" tendency to versify personal losses and "recollect" emotional states of mind.

25. George Amis, "The Structure of the Augustan Couplet," Genre, 9, no. 1 (1976), pp. 44-45. Based on an analysis of some 13,000 lines of Augustan poetry, Amis finds that couplets rhymed verb/noun occur much more often than couplets rhymed noun/verb. Amis also associates the use of verbs as second line rhyme words with "artificial word order" (p. 45). Shade's "Pale Fire" is in the "neo-Popian" genre, as Kinbote rightly says, and is therefore part of the tradition analyzed by Amis.

26. Vladimir Nabokov, Notes on Prosody (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 93.

27. Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy (London: Smith, Elder, 1944), quoted in "Rhyme," The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 707.