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I agree with Carolyn when she says "I fail to understand the brouhaha
over
the rather simple, and beautiful to my eye and ear, line of the false
azure
in the window pane. Isn't this a rather simple metonymy? with the added
heraldic sense that is certainly appropriate to Pale Fire?"
If metonymy is inaccuracy, a lot of poets (including Frost) are in
trouble.
As for azure sounding too high, I recall Richard Hugo writing in his
wonderful book _Triggering Town_ that "[a]ll art that has endured has a
quality we call schmaltz or corn. . . . [I]f you are not risking
sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self." Given that,
taken as
a whole, "Pale Fire" is overwhelmingly down-to-earth, I think we should
welcome a touch of the sublime once every hundred lines or so!
I also think VN is a pretty good judge of color. In a note to Alfred
Appel
(Annotated Lolita 364) he writes: "For me the shades, or rather colors
of,
say, a fox, a ruby, a carrot, a pink rose, a dark cherry, a flushed
cheek,
are as different as blue is from green or the royal purple of blood
(Fr. 'pourpre') from the English sense of violet blue. I think your
students, your readers, should be taught to _see_ things, to
discriminate
between visual shades as the author does, and not to lump them under
such
arbitrary labels as 'red'... Only cartoonists, having three colors at
their
disposal, use red for hair, cheek and blood." I've no doubt that John
Shade felt the same, esp. given his objections to the terms white and
black, as referring to skin color. JS is one of VN's "responsible
characters," and accuracy of color matters to him just as it does to VN.
All that now aside, I also agree with Sergei (I think) who said that
this
discussion somewhat misses the point. What is actually important is how
the poem's goodness or badness relates to the novel as a whole. If VN
intended the poem to be good but the poem is bad, the novel is deeply
flawed. The more difficult question is what happens when we say that VN
intended to poem to be a mediocrity. For me, this interpretation
presents
great aesthetic problems for the novel, but I will save them for now.
As
most people here know, I share Brian Boyd and Helen Vendler's view of
the
poem.
Best,
Matt Roth