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Re: THOUGHTS on the Pale Fire poem
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Here's a passage from William Monroe's Zembla essay on "Pale Fire":
Nabokov himself calls attention to the humorous potential of rhyme in his
Notes on Prosody, part of his scholarly apparatus originally attached to
Eugene Onegin. His depreciation of "fancy rhymes" in English poetry is
invaluable for an analysis of Shade's poem. "In English," Nabokov says, "fancy rhymes
or split rhymes are merely the jester bells of facetious verselets,
incompatible with serious poetry." Hinting at what he means by "fancy rhymes,"
Nabokov says that "the Englishman Byron cannot get away with 'gay
dens'--'maidens.'"26 And as the following selected rhymes indicate, Nabokov has undermined
"Pale Fire's" elegiac serious-ness by his exotic rhyme pairs:
> stillicide / nether side (ll. 35-36) always well / her niece Adele (ll.
> 83-84) my Triassic; green / Upper Pleistocene (ll. 153-54) Age of Stone / my
> funnybone. (ll. 155-56) would debate / Poetry on Channel 8. (ll. 411-12)
> Maybe, Rabelais: / I.P.H., a lay (ll. 501-502) the big G / peripheral debris
> (ll. 549-50) in that state / hallucinate (ll. 723-24) the gory mess / of
> prickliness (ll. 905-906) does require / Will! Pale Fire. (ll. 961-62)
>
>
All of these examples rhyme a monosyllable with a polysyllable--the very
combination that Nabokov says "Byron cannot get away with." A couple of them
even carry the rhyme to an extra syllable in an adjacent word: "Rabelais / a
lay"; "gory mess / prickliness." Such examples are only a selection of the
"jester bells" to be found throughout "Pale Fire," and it is certain that
Nabokov meant them facetiously. To my mind, it is just as certain that
Nabokov's Shade is unaware of their parodic jangling. His aesthetic limitations are
also evinced by the obtrusiveness of the rhymes, for, as Leigh Hunt wrote in
Imagination and Fancy, the mastery of rhyme "consists in never writing it
for its own sake, or at least never appearing to do so."27 Through his poetic
practice, the creation of a traditional elegiac poem, Shade is earnestly
trying to make sense of his own intimations of immortality and to reconcile
himself to the death of his daughter. But such a frank, unsophisticated
performance exposes the aesthetic imagination to culture's engines of power and
consumption. Shade's versified candor commits the classic sin against
Nabokov's aestheticism. To remain sequestered and uncorrupted, one's imagination
must not be Lynched or Krapped. Art must not be slavishly put in the service of
extra-literary enterprises--not by Kinbote, not by Shade, both of whom, in
the end, are befooled by the author's jester bells.
The problem is that Nabokov is talking about the comic use (in Byron) of
double rhymes--"gay den" / "maiden"-- which usually have an intentionally
comic effect, as in many limericks or the lyrics of W. S. Gilbert. But Monroe
then cites, as apparent examples of Shade's ineptitude, pairs of fairly
standard single-syllable ("masculine") rhymes in which a single-syllable word
rhymes with a stressed final syllable in a multisyllabic word. Here I've added
italics to the pairs cited by Monroe:
stillicide / nether side (ll. 35-36) always well / her niece Adele (ll.
83-84) my Triassic; green / Upper Pleistocene (ll. 153-54) Age of Stone / my
funnybone. (ll. 155-56) would debate / Poetry on Channel 8. (ll. 411-12)
Maybe, Rabelais: / I.P.H., a lay (ll. 501-502) the big G / peripheral debris (ll.
549-50) in that state / hallucinate (ll. 723-24) the gory mess / of prickli
ness (ll. 905-906) does require / Will! Pale Fire. (ll. 961-62)
Rhyme in English would be dull indeed if it consisted mainly of pairs of
single-syllable words: June, moon, spoon, croon, etc. Also, Monroe seems to
be assuming that VN would have pronounced "Rabelais" as a three-syllable
word! One can hear the Master groaning. It is interesting here that VN/Shade
uses two examples of what the French would call rime riche, that is, rhyming
syllables with identical sounds: "stillicide" / "side" and "Rabelais" and
"lay" (not "a lay"!).
Compare Chaucer (I've again boldfaced the rhyming syllables):
But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,
Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun
To telle yow al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,
40 And whiche they weren, and of what degree,
And eek in what array that they were inne;
And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.
In Chaucer, of course, many of the rhymes are "feminine," that is, a a
stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one rhyming with a stressed syllable
followed by an unstressed identical one: "in-uh" / "gynn-uh."
Pope rarely uses feminine rhyme, but he often (as does any poet who rhymes)
match up a single-syllable word with a single stressed syllable in another
word.
> Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
> Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
> Where slaves once more their native land behold,
> No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
> To be, contents his natural desire;
> He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
> But things, admitted to that equal sky,
> His faithful dog shall bear him company.
>
Among Monroe's other observations that I find suspect is his linking heroic
couplets to the elegaic tradition since the 17th century. If he's thinking
here about Donne's elegies, well, these aren't elegies in the usual sense
of the word:
AS the sweet sweat of roses in a still,
As that which from chafed musk cat's pores doth trill,
As the almighty balm of th' early east,
Such are the sweat drops of my mistress' breast ;
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seem no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets.
Rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles,
Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils,
Or like the scum, which, by need's lawless law
Enforced, Sanserra's starvèd men did draw
From parboil'd shoes and boots, and all the rest
Which were with any sovereign fatness blest ;
And like vile lying stones in saffron'd tin,
Or warts, or wheals, it hangs upon her skin.
The poetic form usually associated with the elegy is the pentameter
quatrain rhyming abab, called the "elegiac stanza" after Gray's famous use of it.
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Nabokov himself calls attention to the humorous potential of rhyme in his
Notes on Prosody, part of his scholarly apparatus originally attached to
Eugene Onegin. His depreciation of "fancy rhymes" in English poetry is
invaluable for an analysis of Shade's poem. "In English," Nabokov says, "fancy rhymes
or split rhymes are merely the jester bells of facetious verselets,
incompatible with serious poetry." Hinting at what he means by "fancy rhymes,"
Nabokov says that "the Englishman Byron cannot get away with 'gay
dens'--'maidens.'"26 And as the following selected rhymes indicate, Nabokov has undermined
"Pale Fire's" elegiac serious-ness by his exotic rhyme pairs:
> stillicide / nether side (ll. 35-36) always well / her niece Adele (ll.
> 83-84) my Triassic; green / Upper Pleistocene (ll. 153-54) Age of Stone / my
> funnybone. (ll. 155-56) would debate / Poetry on Channel 8. (ll. 411-12)
> Maybe, Rabelais: / I.P.H., a lay (ll. 501-502) the big G / peripheral debris
> (ll. 549-50) in that state / hallucinate (ll. 723-24) the gory mess / of
> prickliness (ll. 905-906) does require / Will! Pale Fire. (ll. 961-62)
>
>
All of these examples rhyme a monosyllable with a polysyllable--the very
combination that Nabokov says "Byron cannot get away with." A couple of them
even carry the rhyme to an extra syllable in an adjacent word: "Rabelais / a
lay"; "gory mess / prickliness." Such examples are only a selection of the
"jester bells" to be found throughout "Pale Fire," and it is certain that
Nabokov meant them facetiously. To my mind, it is just as certain that
Nabokov's Shade is unaware of their parodic jangling. His aesthetic limitations are
also evinced by the obtrusiveness of the rhymes, for, as Leigh Hunt wrote in
Imagination and Fancy, the mastery of rhyme "consists in never writing it
for its own sake, or at least never appearing to do so."27 Through his poetic
practice, the creation of a traditional elegiac poem, Shade is earnestly
trying to make sense of his own intimations of immortality and to reconcile
himself to the death of his daughter. But such a frank, unsophisticated
performance exposes the aesthetic imagination to culture's engines of power and
consumption. Shade's versified candor commits the classic sin against
Nabokov's aestheticism. To remain sequestered and uncorrupted, one's imagination
must not be Lynched or Krapped. Art must not be slavishly put in the service of
extra-literary enterprises--not by Kinbote, not by Shade, both of whom, in
the end, are befooled by the author's jester bells.
The problem is that Nabokov is talking about the comic use (in Byron) of
double rhymes--"gay den" / "maiden"-- which usually have an intentionally
comic effect, as in many limericks or the lyrics of W. S. Gilbert. But Monroe
then cites, as apparent examples of Shade's ineptitude, pairs of fairly
standard single-syllable ("masculine") rhymes in which a single-syllable word
rhymes with a stressed final syllable in a multisyllabic word. Here I've added
italics to the pairs cited by Monroe:
stillicide / nether side (ll. 35-36) always well / her niece Adele (ll.
83-84) my Triassic; green / Upper Pleistocene (ll. 153-54) Age of Stone / my
funnybone. (ll. 155-56) would debate / Poetry on Channel 8. (ll. 411-12)
Maybe, Rabelais: / I.P.H., a lay (ll. 501-502) the big G / peripheral debris (ll.
549-50) in that state / hallucinate (ll. 723-24) the gory mess / of prickli
ness (ll. 905-906) does require / Will! Pale Fire. (ll. 961-62)
Rhyme in English would be dull indeed if it consisted mainly of pairs of
single-syllable words: June, moon, spoon, croon, etc. Also, Monroe seems to
be assuming that VN would have pronounced "Rabelais" as a three-syllable
word! One can hear the Master groaning. It is interesting here that VN/Shade
uses two examples of what the French would call rime riche, that is, rhyming
syllables with identical sounds: "stillicide" / "side" and "Rabelais" and
"lay" (not "a lay"!).
Compare Chaucer (I've again boldfaced the rhyming syllables):
But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,
Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun
To telle yow al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,
40 And whiche they weren, and of what degree,
And eek in what array that they were inne;
And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.
In Chaucer, of course, many of the rhymes are "feminine," that is, a a
stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one rhyming with a stressed syllable
followed by an unstressed identical one: "in-uh" / "gynn-uh."
Pope rarely uses feminine rhyme, but he often (as does any poet who rhymes)
match up a single-syllable word with a single stressed syllable in another
word.
> Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
> Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
> Where slaves once more their native land behold,
> No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
> To be, contents his natural desire;
> He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
> But things, admitted to that equal sky,
> His faithful dog shall bear him company.
>
Among Monroe's other observations that I find suspect is his linking heroic
couplets to the elegaic tradition since the 17th century. If he's thinking
here about Donne's elegies, well, these aren't elegies in the usual sense
of the word:
AS the sweet sweat of roses in a still,
As that which from chafed musk cat's pores doth trill,
As the almighty balm of th' early east,
Such are the sweat drops of my mistress' breast ;
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seem no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets.
Rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles,
Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils,
Or like the scum, which, by need's lawless law
Enforced, Sanserra's starvèd men did draw
From parboil'd shoes and boots, and all the rest
Which were with any sovereign fatness blest ;
And like vile lying stones in saffron'd tin,
Or warts, or wheals, it hangs upon her skin.
The poetic form usually associated with the elegy is the pentameter
quatrain rhyming abab, called the "elegiac stanza" after Gray's famous use of it.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/