Charles Kinbote writes, in the Foreword: " The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and parhelia, occupies thirteen cards. Canto Two, your favorite, and that shocking tour de force, Canto Three, are identical in length (334 lines) and cover twenty-seven cards each. Canto Four reverts to One in length and occupies again thirteen cards..."
Jophn Shade writes in Pale Fire (Canto One):
“My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule — when, beautiful and strange,
110 In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged —
For we are most artistically caged.”
I don’t know what kind of events related to rainbows and sun, in Shade’s poem, correspond to what Charles Kinbote has compared or summarized under “parhelia.” I got so busy trying to understand the physical aspect of it that, because my memory included it in Shade’s poem as a generic feeling, I didn’t notice that I had no clue about its presence in the poem. Today, looking in my photo-archives I came to a collection of pictures my grand-daughter Juliana took of what, as I understand it, is a “parhelium.” ( I hope the singular is correct). The pale fire of the moon cannot be compared to it, can it?
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