Shade's Poetry
Nabokov provides some incidental samples of Shade's work—The Sacred Tree, The Swing— in addition to the title poem. This is a gallant authorial gesture, as when a professor at Cornell, Nabokov had complained from the lectern of authors who ask readers to accept a character's gifts on faith: "The author has hinted already that Gurov was witty in the company of women: and instead of having the reader take it for granted (you know the old method of describing the talk as 'brilliant' but giving no samples of the conversation), Chekhov makes him joke in a really attractive, winning way." The longest sample is Shade's 999-line work, rendered in heroic couplets (rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter), which is also titled "Pale Fire" and provides one facet of the novel's reflexive structure.
Divided into four cantos, Shade's poem describes his life, his obsession with the senses, and his boyhood-to-maturity preoccupation with death. The work is notable for its description of a near-death experience (Shade treats it with a mixture of skepticism and reverence), and for the "faint hope" of an afterlife which it provides.
Shade's poetry is referenced in the last chapter of Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
Read more about this topic: John Shade
Famous quotes containing the words shade and/or poetry:
“When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of Godlike lambs we joy,
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)