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horseshoes is heard from a neighboring yard (horseshoe crabs?). The fateful conjunction of three planets seems to be indicated, and the old astrological notion of events on earth mirroring the movements of the stars in the sky.
    The twinning and doubling proliferate; the multiplication of levels casts a prismatic, opaline light on Faculty Row. Zembla is not just land but earth—“Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp,” as John Shade names the globe; a Zemblan feuilletonist had fancifully dubbed its capital Uranograd—“Sky City.” The fate of Charles the Beloved is a rippling reflection of the fate of Charles II of England on his travels, of Bonnie Prince Charlie and of the deposed Shakespearean rulers for whom streets are named in Onhava—Coriolanus Lane, Timon Alley. Prospero of The Tempest pops in and out of the commentary, like a Fata Morgana, to mislead the reader into looking for “pale fire” in Shakespeare’s swan song. It is not there, but The Tempest is in Pale Fire: Prospero’s emerald isle, called the Ile of Divels, in the New World, Iris, and Juno’s peacock, sea caves, the chess game of Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero’s enchantments, his lost kingdom, and Caliban, whom he taught language, that supreme miracle of mirroring.
    Nature’s imitations of Nature are also evoked—echo, the mocking-bird perched on a television aerial (“TV’s huge paperclip”), the iridescent eyes of the peacock’s fan, the cicada’s emerald case, a poplar tree’s rabbit-foot—all the “natural shams” of protective mimicry by which, as Shade says in his poem, “The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big Wickedly folded moth.” These disguises are not different from the exiled king’s red cap and sweater (like the markings of a bird) or the impersonation of an actor. Not only Nature’s shams but Nature’s freaks dance in and out of the lines: rings around the moon, rainbows and sun dogs (bright spots of light, often colored, sometimes seen on the ring of the solar halo), the heliotrope or sun-turner, which, by a trick of language, is also the bloodstone, Muscovy glass (mica), phosphorescence (named for Venus, the Morning Star), mirages, the roundlet of pale light called the ignis fatuus, fireflies, everything speckled, freckled, curiously patterned, dappled, quaint (as in Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty”). The arrowy tracks of the pheasant, the red heraldic barrings of the Vanessa butterfly, snow crystals. And the imitation of natural effects in manufactures: stained glass, paperweights containing snowstorms and mountain views, glass eyes. Not to mention curios like the bull’s-eye lantern, glass giraffes, Cartesian devils. Botkin, the bearded urning, is himself a prime “freak of Nature,” like Humbert Humbert. And freakish puns of language (“Red Sox Beat Yanks 5/4 on Chapman’s Homer”), “Muscat” (a cat-and-mouse game), anagrams, mirror-writing, such words as “versipel.” The author loves the ampersand and dainty diminutives ending in “let” or “et” (nymphet). Rugged John Shade is addicted to “word-golf,” which he induces Botkin to play with him. Botkin’s best scores are hate-love in three (late-lave-love), lass-male in four (last-mast-malt-male), live-dead in five. If you play word-golf with the title words, you can get pale-hate in two and fire-love in three. Or pale-love in three and fire-hate in three.
    The misunderstandings of scholarship, cases of mistaken word-identity, also enchant this dear author. E.g., “alderwood” and “alderking” keep cropping up in the gloss with overtones of northern forest magic. What can an alderking be, excluding chief or ruler, which would give king-king, a redundancy? Erie is the German word for alder, and the alder tree, which grows in wet places, has the curious property of not rotting under water. Hence it is a kind of magic tree, very useful for piles supporting bridges. And John Shade, writing of