![]() ![]() Pale Fire: Nabokov relies on a much more elaborate melding of the window with frost and snow. "Ballada": "Frozen white palms / bloom noiselessly on the windowpanes." Both poems blend images of snow, frost, or glass playing off of each other. Pale Fire: "Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass / Hang all the furniture above the grass, / And how delightful when a fall of snow / Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so / As to make chair and bed exactly stand / Upon that snow, out in that crystal land…" (lines 7-12).ĭ. "Ballada": The furniture ("chairs, and a table, and a bed") are the "things" that the narrator pities and that apparently "harken" to his "wild song" as the entire room begins to flow and revolve. Both poems make the room furniture part of the pattern of the artificial entry to the other world. Pale Fire: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane /…and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky…" (lines 1-4). "Ballada": The poet "outgrows" himself and "rises above" his "dead being." 6 Then the plaster sky and the sixty-watt sun vanish, and the poet is apparently transformed into Orpheus, standing on black boulders and holding the lyre handed to him from another world. Both artificial skies suggest an entry to death or some form of afterlife. Pale Fire: Shade watches "the false azure in the windowpane" (line 2). "Ballada": The poet looks at a plaster sky with a sixty-watt sun. Both poems begin in rooms with artificial skies. The opening stanzas of the poem Pale Fire share with "Ballada" the following traits:Ī. ![]() Reflections of "Ballada" in the poem Pale Fire A Note on Pale Fire and Khodasevich's "Ballada" ![]()
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