The point is that James Marcus offered only one example of what was wrong about the poem "Pale Fire," without explanation or discussion, and that the example actually indicates the poem’s customary strengths rather than its supposed weaknesses.
Charles, ready to dismiss “Pale Fire,” was happy to concur that Marcus’s sole proffered example was yet another wrong note, though he hadn’t thought it one before:
Azure means blue. Only secondarily does it connote sky. A thing is either blue, or it isn't. It can't be "falsely" blue. Shade's English is not as precise as VN's, and a poet should not allow himself to be so sloppy --- unless it's with deliberate aesthetic intent.
In fact Duncan White’s posting, and the OED, showed this “explanation” of the wrong note to be wrong itself. "The clear blue of the unclouded sky" (OED) is exactly what Shade wants (and exactly what Nabokov wants, at another level, through the connection to "Our blue inenubilable Zembla"; although this overtone is irrelevant to the quality of Shade's poem, the quality of the poem in itself AND what Nabokov does on top of that offer a measure of the whole novel's achievement).
Assuming that the poem sucks, adopting an a priori attitude of dismissal, leads one to welcome other supposed weaknesses without examining what the poem actually does: in this case the poet, far from being sloppy, chooses a word whose dictionary sense alone makes it a mot juste.
Doubly juste, in fact. Let me quote my Pale Fire book, 282n.5: "The 'azure' of the poem's opening couplet also clearly engages with Stéphane Mallarmé's recurrent image of the 'Azur," representing the Ideal, as opposed to the ‘Ici-bas,' the here-below, the here and now, in such poems as 'L'Azur," 'Retourneur,' 'Le Soupir' and especially the most important of these early poems, "Les Fenêtres." [And let me add now that our subject is precisely the "azure of the windowpane."] Nabokov recalled that 'ce n'est pas Coppée ou Lamartine, mais Verlaine et Mallarmé, qui prirent soin de mon adolescence [it wasn't Coppée or Lamartine, but Verlaine and Mallarmé, who took care of my adolescence]." Like Nabokov, Shade knows French and French verse well. In view of Mallarmé's concern with what Renato Poggioli calls "the attendant falling back of the soul from . . . azur to what he named ici-bas," like the waxwing’s fall from the false azure, Shade has perfectly integrated his own metaphysical questing with that of poetic tradition. And as so often, he alludes with precision but without the display of modernist poetic mosaicism.
Trebly juste: as Pekka Tammi was the first to observe, "From Shade's perspective, the opening reference to 'false azure' evidently functions as an anticipatory clue, prefiguring the death of his daughter in Canto Two" ["the three young people stood / Before the azure entrance"]. Lest there be further grumblings, Shade’s "azure" is also accurate and economical in this second and final occurrence in the poem, in evoking and describing the color of the argon-and-mercury lighting of the logo for the Hawaiian bar.
Quadruply juste, I would suggest: "azure" can be pronounced with a long a (see the second pronunciation listed in Webster’s Second) and thereby becomes a virtual homophone of "Asia." As many have noticed, and as I discuss at length in my Pale Fire book, there is a pattern of winged creatures, and especially of birds and insects, throughout the poem; Shade's parents were after all ornithologists, after whom a new waxwing was even named. Shortly after the “azure” that the waxwing hits at the start of the first verse paragraph, Shade associates the second bird in the poem, at the end of the second verse paragraph, with Asia (where as Shade and Nabokov knew the ring-necked pheasant Phasianus colchicus torquatus originated) and with the sense of the other side of the world, the strangeness of the remote or extreme, in the expression "to dig for China":
A pheasant's feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,
Finding your China right behind my house.
That last line suggests that Shade and Nabokov probably had in mind specifically Richard Wilbur’s poem “Digging for China” (first collected in 1956):
Digging for China
"Far enough down is China," somebody said.
"Dig deep enough and you might see the sky
As clear as at the bottom of a well.
Except it would be real--a different sky.
Then you could burrow down until you came
To China! Oh, it's nothing like New Jersey.
There's people, trees, and houses, and all that,
But much, much different. Nothing looks the same."
I went and got the trowel out of the shed
And sweated like a coolie all that morning,
Digging a hole beside the lilac-bush,
Down on my hands and knees. It was a sort
Of praying, I suspect. I watched my hand
Dig deep and darker, and I tried and tried
To dream a place where nothing was the same.
The trowel never did break through to blue.
Before the dream could weary of itself
My eyes were tired of looking into darkness,
My sunbaked head of hanging down a hole.
I stood up in a place I had forgotten,
Blinking and staggering while the earth went round
And showed me silver barns, the fields dozing
In palls of brightness, patens growing and gone
In the tides of leaves, and the whole sky china blue.
Until I got my balance back again
All that I saw was China, China, China.
Note the “never did break through to blue . . . the whole sky china blue . . . China, China, China.”
Nabokov’s first recorded interest in Wilbur dates to 1951 (Wilbur had been published in the New Yorker in the late 1940s, at a time when Nabokov was often being published there); he first met him at Harvard in 1952; he sat in the front row for a reading Wilbur gave at Cornell later in the 1950s; in the 1960s he singled out Wilbur’s “Complaint” as the sole instance he cared to record of recent reading that had given him “the spinal twinge which is the only valid reaction to a new piece of great poetry” (SO 134). Wilbur, incidentally, won the 2006 Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry ($100,000), one of the US’s most valuable; the editor of Poetry, Christian Wiman, said in announcing the award: "If you had to put all your money on one living poet whose work will be read in a hundred years, Richard Wilbur would be a good bet. He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop."
In another post today Arthur Glass aptly quotes Henry James's definition of "the critical challenge" as "essentially the spirit of fine attention." The problem I have with the dismissers of "Pale Fire" is that their attitude makes it hard for them to see what Shade and Nabokov are doing in the poem: it coarsens their attention, curiosity, and recall, all essential in reading poets as allusive and wily and addicted to concealed pattern as Shade and his maker. Reading critically should have nothing to do with sycophancy (I have been severely negative of some of Nabokov's work; and to whom would admirers of the poem "Pale Fire" like Ron Rosenbaum, Helen Vendler and I need to be sycophantic?) but it does have a lot to do with imaginative sympathy as well as independence.
Shade is as different from Frost as Pope is from Gray, but all have written great poetry.