ln 167: "There was a time in my demented youth"
Perhaps a reference to Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality Ode which begins:

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
    The earth, and every common sight,
            To me did seem
    Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

ln 180: "Devoting all my twisted life to this"
ln 181: "One task. Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings."

As I've suggested before, the idea or goal of immortality or life after death from between the borders of life represented visually through the number itself: 181. See also 1881 and the Butterfly of Doom (Lex Luthor's insect pet).

ln 183: "The little scissors I am holding are / A dazzling synthesis of sun and star"

Mirror motif in the scissors, synthesis, night and day, one and many. Why the passive voice progressive tense?

ln 185-186: "I stand before the window and I pare / My fingernails and vaguely am aware", ln 245: "And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear"

When asked by Alfred Appel about this apparent allusion to Joyce, VN replied: "Neither Kinbote nor Shade, nor their maker, is answering Joyce in Pale Fire. Actually, I never liked _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_. I find it a feeble and garrulous book. The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence." (Strong Opinions, 70-71)

ln 231: see K's variant pg 167

ln 316: See 183-184 for K's variant: "In woods Virginia Whites occurred in May"

ln 343: "With a Korean boy who took my course": He shows up for Shade's birthday party on page 160.

ln 368: "Grim Pen": Another cage.

ln 419: see variant on pg 202.

ln 423: "I was in time to overhear brief fame": Illusory immortality.

ln 500: "Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank."

The dead center of the poem. Hazel, like Ophelia, drowns. See also Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, which includes the lines:

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade...."




Maybe Kinbote is correct that it's a cicada's cast skin (exuvia): These tend to be brown where I live, but the ones in the photos on this site could be called emerald I suppose (probably depends on the species). Incidentally, juvenile cicadas are called "nymphs", and burrow underground for usually 13 or 17 years (depends on species, but always tends to be a prime number for some reason), then lives only 2-6 weeks as an adult.

Also, the male cicada apparently makes the loudest sound of all insects.

Also, the letters P or W can often be made out on a cicada's wings, and there's some folklore that maintains a P indicates peace, while a W indicates war.

Also, cicadas are not locusts, as they are sometimes confused.

Periodical cicadas
More on cicadas



ln 270: "My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest"
The Vanessa atalanta Butterfly, aka the Red Admirable, aka the Red Admiral. From a 1970 interview with Alfred Appel:

Appel: "That particular butterfly appears frequently in your own work, too. In Pale Fire, a Red Admirable lands on John Shade's arm the minute before he is killed, the insect appears in King, Queen Knave just after you've withdrawn the authorial omniscience -- killing the characters, so to speak -- and in the final chapter of Speak Memory, you recall having seen in a Paris park, just before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a leash of thread by a little girl. Why are you so fond of Vanessa atalanta?

VN: "Its coloring is quite splendid and I liked it very much in my youth. Great numbers of them migrated from Africa to Northern Russia, where it was called "The Butterfly of Doom" because it was especially abundant in 1881, the year Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and the markings on the underside of its two hind wings seem to read '1881.' The Red Admirable's ability to travel so far is matched by many other migratory butterflies." (Strong Opinions, 170)



Several references to Lolita in Canto Two:

ln 254: "In April's haze immediately behind" Charlotte and Dolores ("Lolita") Haze, not to mention Hazel Shade. Lolita wasn't "immediately behind" Pale Fire in composition dates (Pnin is in the middle); perhaps he means in quality?

ln 270: "My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest"

Vanessa Van Ness in Lolita ("fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh", mother of little Annabel, "a certain initial girl-child.").

ln 274-275: see K's "false start" following ln 274 on page 174: "I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man' / In Spanish . . ."

A link to Humbert Humbert: Shade in Latin is "umbra", close to "Humbert", as is "hombre", Spanish for man. "Ombre" is also a 17th century card game. (Okay, premature -- sorry, I couldn't help it.)

ln 408: "A male hand traced from Florida to Maine":

See repetition on ln 680: "Lolita swept from Florida to Maine"

ln 413: "A nymph came pirouetting, under white"

See pg 202 for variant: "A nymphet pirouetted"; more abstraction into art and the "real" world, in this case VN's own.



ln 254: "In April's haze immediately behind"
Perhaps an allusion to Eliot's The Waste Land?

ln 376-379: "(some phony modern poem that was said" etc.

Definite allusion to Eliot's Four Quartets. The words Hazel asks about: "grimpen" (ln 368), "chtonic" (ln 370), and "sempiternal" (ln 372) are all found in that poem. From Boyd:

"Peter Lubin identified the sources in his 'Kickshaws and Motley' (1970), 205n.7, to which Nabokov responded: 'Very beautifully he tracks down to their lairs in Eliot three terms queried by a poor little person in Pale Fire' (Strong Opinions, 291). (Nabokov's comment plays on the tracking down of the hound of the Baskervilles -- Conan Doyle's novel is the source for Eliot's word -- to its lair in Grimpen Mire.) As Foster notes (Nabokov's Art of Memory, 223-24), the 'grimpen' (swamp) and 'sempiternal' (in Eliot's poem: 'Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown') anticipate Hazel's death in a swamp, as she steps off the ice on a 'night of thaw' when 'Black spring / Stood just around the corner" (P.494-96)." (Boyd, The Magic of Artistic Discovery, 273).

See also ln 369-370 for the rhyme "again" with "explain", making fun of Eliot's adopted Britishness.

Question: is Shade (or VN) writing an answer to Eliot's *Christian* poem?