"Pale Fire", the poem, has been described as:
(a) something "pale and diaphanous", "a transparent thingum" - ie: a feeble light, irrespective of its causation;
(b) in need of a "moondrop" title;
(c) comparable to the satellite whose light reflects or robs the fire of a sun -ie: it is undecided if it reflects CK's story, Shakespeare or Frost;
(d) describing a "crystal land," related to Zembla, perhaps like "crystal to crystal";
(e) a poem whose structure bears a crystal symmetry and "predictable growth".
CK's images are curiously mingled when he returns to the (Shakespearean) sun-moon orbs of heat and light:
(a) Zembla and CK like the sun, Shade like the moon:
1. He suggests that PF sheds a waning moon's diaphanous light, seeing himself as the steady sun:
"Although I realize only too clearly, alas, that the result, in its pale and diaphanous final phase, cannot be regarded as a direct echo of my narrative..."
2. CK's Zemblan story not only glows like the sun, but it warms Shade into a boiling bubbling point:
"one can hardly doubt that the sunset glow of the story acted as a catalytic agent upon the very process of the sustained creative effervescence;"
3. CK's effect on Shade engenders a resemblance in color and hue, ie: it must be closer to ice-crystals/moonlight than to sun/moon:
"a symptomatic family resemblance in the coloration of both poem and story."
(b) CK is like the moon,he borrows an opalescent light from Shade's sun:
"in many cases have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet’s fiery orb"
When CK quotes Shade's exclamation, after a snowflake settled upon his wrist-watch ( "Crystal to crystal.", cf. Foreword), he notes that in this case the "mechanism of the associations is easy to make out (glass leading to crystal and crystal to ice)"
He mentions both Frost and Thomas Hardy when he observes that the word "stillicide" suggests "a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop. ...The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop."
It is worth remembering that the word "crystal" is derived from the ancient Greek word krustallos, cold drop / frozen drop - applicable both to the mineral, itself, and to the process that shapes the snow flakes.
Frost and crystals come up again, in his comment to line 426: "his line displays one of those combinations of pun and metaphor at which our poet excels. In the temperature charts of poetry high is low, and low high, so that the degree at which perfect crystallization occurs is above that of tepid facility. This is what our modest poet says, in effect, respecting the atmosphere of his own fame [...] With all his excellent gifts, John Shade could never make his snowflakes settle that way."
Here CK is returning to the theme of Shade's purported "crystal on crystal," when he mentions Frost's "prodigious and poignant end — two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical and universal." *
When he emphasizes that he prefers to avoid a direct quote, because he might "displace one small precious word." and now he is either being ironical ( since the two lines are identical), or he is then referring to J.L.Borges' story of Pierre Ménard (in "Ficciones"),** who wrote an exact copy of Don Quixote, entrusting the reader to distinguish, like Kinbote, "the personal and physical" from the "metaphysical and universal."
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* Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by R.Frost
"But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
** Extracted from Wiki:
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about (the non-existent) Pierre Menard, a 20th century French writer. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of all of Menard's work. Borges's "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of accurate translation.
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is indeed literary criticism but through the medium of fantasy, irony, and humor. His narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-line identical to the original) to be much richer in allusion than Cervantes's "original" work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602. Cervantes, the reviewer claims, "indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country". While Menard writes of the distant past ("the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope”), in Cervantes “there are neither bands of Gypsies, conquistadors... nor autos de fe". In this, Borges anticipates the post-modern theory that gives centrality to reader response [...] As so often in his writings, the story abounds in clever references and subtle jokes. His narrator/reviewer is an arch-Catholic who remarks of the readers of a rival journal that they are "few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised". According to Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, Menard is in part "a caricature of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry … or Miguel de Unamuno and Enrique Larreta".