17th july 2005
one oozy footstep

In a recent TLS article, Abraham Socher took two whole Kinbotian pages to reveal to us groundlings that the inspiration for the opening of Pale Fire's poem was this short Frost poem:

Of a Winter Evening aka Questioning Faces

The winter owl banked just in time to pass
And save herself from breaking window glass
And her wings straining suddenly aspread
Caught color from the last of evening red
In a display of underdown and quill
To glassed-in children at the window sill.

which was first published in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1958, four years before the publication of Pale Fire. Nabokov has said somewhere that he knew only one Frost poem well, and this has often been assumed to be Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, which Kinbote comically comments on in the book. But it seems that the bird / glass / perspective reversal swing it for the verse above as the precursor to that great opening.
Now, I never know whether this is a bit gauche, but I like John Shade's poem in Pale Fire a lot - I like it more than mediocre Frost (which the above is), more than a lot of good Frost. That Nabokov - he just didn't care. At least I hope he didn't.

comment