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Pale Fire: Canto Four
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pale Fire, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity, Delusion, and Loneliness
Death, Mystery, and the Afterlife
Patterns, Fate, and Coincidence
Loss and Longing
The Nature of Art
Summary
Analysis
Lines 1-4: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain. Kinbote writes that this opening image describes a bird that dies smacking into the reflection of the sky in Shade’s window. He imagines John Shade as a young boy, seeing the dead bird and experiencing the shock of death. When Shade and Kinbote were neighbors, Kinbote often saw waxwings by Shade’s house.
Kinbote opens his Commentary by describing what is literally happening in the poem—that a bird has died by flying into a window. But what he doesn’t do is the basic job of a scholarly commentary: suggesting to readers what this line means and giving context for how to interpret it. For example, he could have explained how this image evokes the possibility of an afterlife and Shade’s obsession with immortality (since, while the waxwing is dead, Shade is seeing himself as its shadow, suggesting that its life continues on in some form). Or Kinbote could have noted here what he notes later on: that Shade’s own father had a species of waxwing named after him (implying that the waxwing might also be a stand-in for Shade’s dead parents, with Shade himself as their “shadow,” carrying their existence forward after their death). All of this would be standard information for a scholarly Commentary, but Kinbote’s inability to provide it immediately casts doubt on his ability as a scholar and interpreter of poetry.
Themes
Kinbote had previously only known about northern European birds, but his gardener in New Wye—a young man “in whom [he] was interested”—taught him to identify local birds. Oddly, the waxwing resembles a bird that appears on the crest of Zembla’s King Charles the Beloved, whose “misfortunes” Shade and Kinbote often discussed.
Kinbote’s acknowledgement that he knows about the birds of northern Europe situates the fictional land of Zembla somewhere in northern Europe, likely close to Russia (since Kinbote frequently describes the significant Russian influence on Zembla). His “interest” in the young gardener is sexual, which perhaps explains why Kinbote has patience for the gardener teaching him about birds, but he hates whenever Shade discusses nature. The reference to the waxwing-like bird in the Zemblan crest immediately establishes a connection between Zembla and the world of New Wye—many such “coincidences” connect New Wye to Zembla, establishing Zembla as a sort of mirror world to Kinbote’s life in New Wye (and also suggesting that Kinbote may be inventing Zembla based on the events in his life in America).
Themes
Shade began “Pale Fire” just after midnight on July 1st—the exact middle of the year—and Shade would certainly understand Kinbote’s desire to synchronize the start of the poem with the departure of the “would-be regicide” Gradus, but actually Gradus left Zembla five days later.
Themes
Line 12: that crystal land. This may be a reference to Kinbote’s homeland of Zembla. In a particularly disorganized draft that didn’t make it into the final copy, there are lines here that describe how a friend told Shade about a “certain king,” but Shade seems to have cut them due to censorship by a “domestic anti-Karlist” (Sybil).
Themes
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Discerning historians will remember Charles the Beloved’s reign as a peaceful time in Zembla in which the arts and sciences thrived and the poor got richer as the rich got a bit poorer (which might someday be known as “Kinbote’s Law”). Influenced by his uncle Conmal (a Shakespeare translator), Charles the Beloved developed a passion for literature. At age 40, just before the end of his reign, Charles began teaching literature in disguise—it would be unbecoming, after all, for a king to teach. Kinbote himself, after not shaving for a year, resembles King Charles in disguise.
Themes
Line 17: And then the gradual; Line 29: gray. Coincidentally, with the words “gradual” and “gray,” Shade nearly names the man that he would meet for a “fatal moment” three weeks after writing these lines. Jakob Gradus also goes by Jack Degree, Jacques de Grey, and various other aliases. Gradus, who loved Soviet Russia, worked in the liquor business and flirted with political radicalism in the leadup to the Zemblan revolution. He left for Europe with a gun and a malicious intent on the same day that Shade began Canto Two of “Pale Fire.” Throughout the Commentary, Kinbote will analyze the poem and simultaneously follow Gradus’s journey to New Wye as he walks in “iambic motion” or “ride[s] past in a rhyme.”
Line 27: Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is a detective in Conan Doyle stories, although Kinbote does not know which story is referenced here—he suspects that Shade made the reversed footprints up.
Themes
Lines 34-35: Stilettos of a frozen stillicide. Shade often uses wintry imagery, even though he wrote the poem in summer. Kinbote is “too modest to suppose” that the winter imagery comes from the fact that he and Shade first met in winter. The word “stillicide” means, according to Kinbote’s dictionary, water dripping from eaves (“eavesdrop”). He saw this word once in a poem by Thomas Hardy, and the word subtly evokes “regicide.”
Themes
Lines 39-40: Was close my eyes, etc. Kinbote points to an abandoned draft of this passage, which seems similar to a passage from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. However, since Kinbote doesn’t have a library in the remote cabin where he is writing, he can only re-translate the passage in question from a Zemblan translation of Timon of Athens that he happens to have with him. “The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun,” Kinbote translates.
Themes
Line 42: I could make out. In early summer, Kinbote began to see how Shade would describe Zembla in his poem. Kinbote had been relentlessly telling stories of his homeland, certain that Shade would write the poem about Zembla that he himself could not. While “Pale Fire” unfortunately did not turn out to be explicitly about Zembla, it’s obvious that the “sunset glow” of Kinbote’s stories inspired Shade’s burst of creativity that produced the poem. Moreover, Kinbote himself—in rereading his own Commentary—realizes that he has “borrowed a kind of opalescent light from my poet’s fiery orb,” subconsciously imitating Shade’s own style in the Commentary.
Themes
Aside from the three references to royalty and the “Popian ‘Zembla’ in line 937,” it seems that Kinbote’s stories were deliberately eliminated from “Pale Fire.” Nonetheless, the poem’s abandoned drafts are full of references to Charles the Beloved.
Themes
Lines 47-48: the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith. “Goldsworth” refers to Kinbote’s landlord, Judge Goldsworth (whom Kinbote never met, because he was abroad during Kinbote’s time in New Wye). “Wordsmith” refers to Wordsmith University, where Kinbote and Shade worked. The Goldsworth house was uncomfortable, and Kinbote hated living among the family’s possessions. In the judge’s papers, he found pictures of people whom Goldsworth had sent to prison, including a homicidal maniac who resembles Jacques d’Argus. Goldsworth also left annoyingly detailed instructions on how to care for the house, which Shade found hilarious. Shade’s stories of the judge always left out how Goldsworth’s severe sentences meant that tons of men were in prison aching for revenge.
Themes
Kinbote struggles to describe the architecture of Shade’s house, particularly because—as summer approached—the leaves of a nearby tree blocked him from seeing into Shade’s windows. On July 3rd, Kinbote went to bring “some third class mail” from Shade’s mailbox to his door when he ran into Sybil, who told him not to bother Shade because he was at work on a poem. Kinbote exclaimed that Shade hadn’t shown anything to him yet, and Sybil replied that Shade never showed drafts to anyone. Sure enough, Shade was reluctant to give any information about his poem no matter how much Kinbote pried, which led him to an “orgy of spying” that he could not control. Shade went to extreme pains to find spots in his house from which he could see into Shade’s house.
Themes
As a boy, Kinbote once saw a man communing with God. It was at court in Onhava, the Zemblan capital, and Kinbote was hiding during hymnal practice from a boy he was upset with. A minister walked by and then stopped, enraptured—a bliss that Kinbote remembered upon seeing Shade’s face while he wrote “Pale Fire.” Every day, Kinbote spied, but some nights the house was dark before the Shades’ bedtime. On July 11th—the day on which Shade finished Canto Two—Kinbote decided to investigate.
Themes
Kinbote snuck behind their house where he found one small window illuminated. Through the window, he could see John and Sybil sitting on a sofa, apparently weeping as they gathered up a deck of cards. As Kinbote tried to get a better view, he knocked over a trash can, which made Sybil close the window and draw the shade.
Themes
A few days later, when Shade missed an appointment to take a walk with Kinbote, Kinbote walked behind Shade’s house and saw John and Sybil sitting at the kitchen table. He opened the door without knocking and realized that John seemed to be reading to Sybil. Startled, John swore at Kinbote, but he later said that it was because he thought his friend was an “intruding salesman.” This encounter made Kinbote realize that not only was Shade reading his poem to Sybil, but he was probably taking Sybil’s directions to cut all the Zembla material from “Pale Fire.”
Themes
