Mountain ViewBetween the mountain and the eye
The spirit of the distance draws
A veil of blue amorous gauze,
The very texture of the sky.
A breeze reaches the pines, and I
Join in the general applause.
But we all know it cannot last,
The mountain is too weak to wait --
Even if reproduced and glassed
In me as in a paperweight.
Charles Kinbote clipped this stray poem, written by John Shade, from a newspaper. Of course, Kinbote never found it and Shade never wrote it - both characters and their works (Shade's poem and life, Kinbote's commentary and delusion) are inventions of Nabokov. And, worse still, this poem may be an invention of the commentator and not even belonging to the Poet, himself. It is only introduced by way of the word "paperweight" in the 92nd line of Shade's Pale Fire. Some readers even posit that Kinbote is Shade, or a piece of his psyche, or some such double. It gets messy trying to attribute the actual words to an actual person, and the funny knot stays firmly tangled. Still, though - still. I find the poems that I like best are those that are invented by the invented poets of novelists inside larger fictional works. Salinger's Glass and Ford, being the two most memorable. Oddly enough, the only output we actually have from each man is no more than a stray stanza or two (save for Seymour's letters to family.)
Oddly, though, the Mountain does pop back up amongst the poem in Lines 801-etc.
"There's one misprint - not that it matters much:
Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch."
Life everlasting - based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream.
