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. And I experienced the same thrill as when in my early boyhood I once watched across the tea table in my uncle’s castle a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and was now quietly consuming a vanilla ice. I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air. Shade’s poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards into his hat — and shook out a poem. To this poem we now must turn. My Foreword has been, I trust, not too skimpy. Other notes, arranged in a running commentary, will certainly satisfy the most voracious reader. Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture. I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing, or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table — not like the shaky little affair on which my typewriter is precariously enthroned now, in this wretched motor lodge, with that carrousel inside and outside my head, miles away from New Wye. Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word. CHARLES KINBOTE Oct. 19, 1959, Cedarn, Utana

PALE FIRE

A Poem in Four Cantos

Canto One

1 I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
10 Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day's pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.
And then the gradual and dual blue
As night unites the viewer and the view,
And in the morning, diamonds of frost

20 Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed
From left to right the blank page of the road?
Reading from left to right in winter’s code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back… A pheasant’s feet
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?

All colors made me happy: even gray.

30 My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. Whenever I’d permit,
Or, with a silent shiver, order it,
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt —
An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide —
Was printed on my eyelids’ nether side
Where it would tarry for an hour or two,
And while this lasted all I had to do
Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
40 Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.

I cannot understand why from the lake
I could make out our front porch when I'd take
Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree
Has intervened, I look but fail to see
Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space
Has caused a fold or furrow to displace 
The fragile vista, the frame house between 
Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green.

I had a favorite young shagbark there 

50 With ample dark jade leaves and a black, spare,
Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun
Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone
Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell.
It is now stout and rough; it has done well.
White butterflies turn lavender as they
Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway
The phantom of my little daughter’s swing.

The house itself is much the same. One wing 
We've had revamped. There's a solarium. There's 

60 A picture window flanked with fancy chairs.
TV’s huge paperclip now shines instead
Of the stiff vane so often visited
By the naïve, the gauzy mockingbird
Retelling all the programs she had heard;
Switching from chippo-chippo to a clear
To-wee, to-wee; then rasping out: come here,
Come here, come herrr’; flirting her tail aloft,
Or gracefully indulging in a soft
Upward hop-flop, and instantly (to-wee!)
70 Returning to her perch — the new TV.

I was an infant when my parents died. 
They both were ornithologists. I've tried 
So often to evoke them that today 
I have a thousand parents. Sadly they 
Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, 
But certain words, chance words I hear or read, 
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer, 
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.

A preterist: one who collects cold nests.

80 Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests.
Here, tucked away by the Canadian maid,
I listened to the buzz downstairs and prayed
For everybody to be always well,
Uncles and aunts, the maid, her niece Adéle
Who’d seen the Pope, people in books, and God.

I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud, 
A poet and a painter with a taste 
For realistic objects interlaced 
With grotesque growths and images of doom.

90 She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room
We’ve kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,
The human skull; and from the local Star
A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
On Chapman’s Homer, thumbtacked to the door.

My God died young. Theolatry I found 

100 Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me
And how my childish palate loved the taste
Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!
My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule — when, beautiful and strange,
110 In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged —
For we are most artistically caged.

And there's the wall of sound: the nightly wall 
Raised by a trillion crickets in the fall. 
Impenetrable! Halfway up the hill 
I'd pause in thrall of their delirious trill. 
That's Dr. Sutton's light. That's the Great Bear.

120 A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

The regular vulgarian, I daresay, 
Is happier: he sees the Milky Way 
Only when making water. Then as now 
I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough, 
Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat, 

130 I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By feigned remoteness in the windowpane. 
I had a brain, five senses (one unique); 
But otherwise I was a cloutish freak. 
In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps 
But really envied nothing - save perhaps 
The miracle of a lemniscate left 
Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft 
Bicycle tires. 

A thread of subtle pain, 

140 Tugged at by playful death, released again,
But always present, ran through me. One day,
When I’d just turned eleven, as I lay
Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy —
A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy —
Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time: 
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand 

150 Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.

During one winter every afternoon 
I'd sink into that momentary swoon. 
And then it ceased. Its memory grew dim.

160 My health improved. I even learned to swim.
But like some little lad forced by a wench
With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,
I was corrupted, terrified, allured,
And though old doctor Colt pronounced me cured
Of what, he said, were mainly growing pains,
The wonder lingers and the shame remains.

Canto Two

There was a time in my demented youth 
When somehow I suspected that the truth 
About survival after death was known - 

170 To every