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Pale Fire: Canto Three
Themes
and Colors
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
Shade declares that he will “spy on beauty” as nobody has done before, and cry out, and try what hasn’t been tried. He spells out two methods of writing: A, which happens in a poet’s mind while he occupies himself with another task, and B, which happens when he is actually writing with a pen. In B, the “hand supports the thought” by transforming images or ideas into words, while A is agonizing, because the writer cannot think of anything but the poem, even as he tries to do something else. In method A, everything has to be in the poet’s head at once, but it’s possible that this makes the poem better, since he cannot write down a false line and just leave it there—sometimes the right word comes only when he’s away from his desk.
Shade’s revelation about life and death has reinvigorated his commitment to using his poetry to evoke the world’s beauty and invent new forms and patterns in his art. The fact that he turns from such a momentous spiritual revelation at the end of the last canto to a prosaic description of his writing process at the beginning of this one shows how Shade implicitly connects his writing to his spirituality. Creating his poetry is, for him, a type of creation that mirrors the way that the “players” in the last canto create patterns and accidents that form the beauty of human life. This passage suggests that Shade is always writing, even when he’s not physically writing, and that some of his truest ideas come when he’s out in the world, rather than at his desk.
Active
Themes
Shade writes best on midsummer mornings. Once, he was half-asleep and imagined that he was on the dewy lawn wearing only one shoe—but when he woke up, one shoe was on the lawn, which was a “mystery,” “mirage,” and “miracle.”
These are the kinds of inexplicable events that make Shade rejoice, because they point to mystery and coincidence, which he associates with proof that there is truth and order to the universe that human beings can never know.
Active
Themes
Since his biographer might be too proper or uninformed to know that he shaved in the bath, Shade details how he shaves and describes his skin thinning and how that makes him nick himself more. The commercials where one-armed men shave perfectly seem impossible; Shade struggles to shave even with both hands. But sometimes, when he suddenly realizes the perfect image or phrase for a poem, his hairs stand on end in the way that the man’s hairs do in the commercials when they’re held up with shaving cream. The blade traveling across Shade’s cheek is like cars driving on the highway or like plowing “Old Zembla’s fields.”
Active
Themes
“Man’s life as commentary to abstruse/Unfinished poem. Note for further use,” Shade writes. As he dresses, he roams the house thinking about poetry; his “muse” is with him wherever he goes. But at every moment, Sybil is also there, too, “beneath the word, above/The syllable, to underscore and stress/The vital rhythm.” She is youthful and she makes his old words—which he wrote for her—alive again when she speaks them.
Active
Themes
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As the day fades, Shade feels tired and he lets go of some of the poetry he meant to write. He muses that maybe he loves the consonne d’appui because he believes that life itself is “fantastically planned” and “richly rhymed.” In this moment, he feels like he understands his existence only through his poetry. But the universe, like his poetry, “scans right,” and he believes that the poetry of galaxies is written also in iambic meter. He’s pretty sure that people survive death, and that his daughter is alive somewhere, just as he is “reasonably sure” that he’ll wake the next morning, July 22nd. With this, it’s time to put aside his poetry for the evening.
The sun is setting, and Sybil is in the garden—Shade sees her shadow by the shagbark tree and hears a neighbor playing horseshoes. A Vanessa butterfly sweeps over the lawn, and “some neighbor’s gardener” walks by with a wheelbarrow.
Active
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