Recommended for literature geeks only. And I mean real literature geeks. It will help enormously to have some background in English poetry and literature to follow along as the author explains how to use ambiguity to produce various effects in writing.
William Empson has a wonderful gift for articulating all the unspoken feelings, images and notions that pass through our minds as we read good poetry or prose. He puts words to things that I would have thought impossible to describe, like how a feeling creeps over you as you read certain lines of poetry, even though you may not know why or what it was precisely that created that feeling. He explains techniques of communication and rhetoric with great facility, even describing techniques that in fact fail if the reader perceives them while reading!
You will learn about several excellent minor poets (see for example Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughn, George Herbert, Richard Lovelace, Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others) as well as learn minor works of the great poets (a couple of examples that at least in my case my education overlooked: Milton's Lycidas and John Donne's A Validiction, of Weeping). There's an excellent review of many passages in several Shakespeare plays, and an interesting analysis of several of Shakespeare's sonnets. I read the Sonnets in undergrad, but like many young people found them difficult and unapproachable, works that simply did not resonate with me at that stage of life. As I grow older I find I appreciate them much, much more.
This is a book from (and for) a more hypercognizant age. One bows reverently to this author's absolute mastery of the English literary tradition, and yet he somehow managed to write a book both humble and self-effacing at the same time it is dense and technical.
Preface to the Second Edition
vii "Sir Max Beerbohm has a fine reflection on revising one of his early works; he said he tried to remember how angry he would have been when he wrote it if an elderly pedant had made corrections, and how certain he would have felt that the man was wrong."
xiv "One of the best known short poems by Blake is actually crossed out by the author in the notebook which is the only source of it." [On the idea that authors--even great authors--can't judge their own works, likewise critics don't know necessarily which works are great or not; and further that later readers often see in a poem much more than the author himself put there.] Also an interesting example here of the painter John Constable and painting studies that he had done: his unfinished or preliminary works were seen by the critical establishment as tremendously important and much better than his actual finished works! "The point I am trying to make is that this final 'judgment' is a thing which must be indefinitely postponed."
Chapter 1
[First-type ambiguities arise when a detail is affected in several ways at once]
1 "An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language."
2-3 "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang" from the Sonnets, with the ambiguity of a variety of references, ruin, monastery, it used to have a human choir but now it's where birds sit, the church is destroyed for various historical reasons, all of these ambiguities combine and the reader may not actually know which ambiguity precisely is at play, but they "all combine to give the line its beauty"... "the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry."
3 On the nuances behind the phrase "this poet will mean more to you when you have had more experience of life" [this is the sort of thing a college professor will tell a young student for example: and a student like me would roll his eyes, but then twenty years later recognize my professor was right all along...] It goes to having more information, more experience, more understanding of verbal subtleties, and growing into the type of person who can extract experience from what is described in poetry.
8 Confronting two fundamental objections: 1) that the meaning of poetry does not matter because it is apprehended as Pure Sound, and 2) that what really matters about poetry is the Atmosphere. Pure sound is the oddity of the way poetry acts, lines seem beautiful without reason and people can decide if a poem deserves further attention just by glancing at it; the author makes a hilarious quote here about practitioners of Pure Sound who read passages from Homer to infants "not unlike Darwin playing the trombone to his French beans." (!!!)
10-11 "Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore" (Aeneid, VI) "and they stretched out their hands in yearning for the other shore" [regarding souls of the unburied waiting to cross the river to the afterworld]. The author here is using an example where you have to know a lot about the phrase before you can understand the impact of the sentence's sound (that there's assonance, the last two words connect in a sorrowful sense hinting at a long wait, etc), thereby disproving the Pure Sound idea.
12-13 On synesthesia: "apprehension in terms of one of the senses is described in terms of, or compared with, one of the others." On mezcal (as well as migraine and epileptic states) helping people transition between senses, how they think they're seeing something delightful... if they could just make out what it was.
16 On the concept of atmosphere: that a poetic effect conveys some physical intimate quality, sensation not attached to any one sense; atmosphere "conveyed in some unknown and fundamental way as a by-product of meaning."
17 "In wishing to apply verbal analysis to poetry the position of the critic is like that of the scientist wishing to apply determinism to the world."
18 An example from Macbeth (Act 3, scene 2, lines 50ff) "where an affective state is conveyed particularly vividly by devices of particular irrelevance."
21 "This introduction is grown too long and too portentous; it is time I settled down to the little I can do in this chapter..."
22 On false antithesis, placing words as if in opposition but without saying in what way they're opposed. Showing a "trivial" example of this in Peacock's War Song where heroes and cravens and spearmen and bowmen are listed in successive lines as categories of the dead but without a distinction, since they're all dead; a type of "failure of the antithesis":
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.
22-3 See also the example from Pope's poem Unfortunate Lady, with an antithesis of high versus low birth that sits in the reader's mind in sort of an unclear or inchoate way, "what is important about such devices is that they leave it to the reader vaguely to invent something, and make him leave it at the back of his mind."
23-25 Another technique: using a comparative adjective but without a specified noun to be compared with, the "general form" of ambiguity:
Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.
Note the contrast between swiftly and stillness which produces ambiguity as the words "put two time-scales into the reader's mind in a single act of apprehension... two statements are made as if they were connected, and the reader is forced to consider their relations for himself."
25 Using metaphors which are recognized as metaphors but also can be received simply "as words in their acquired sense." An example from Nash's poem Summer's Last Will and Testament:
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour.
This is a reference to time as the thing that devours or eats literally everything, gluttonously, hence the Latin phrase edax rerum, while on a superficial level this is sort of a mixed metaphor. Other examples in this stands of poetry for example Brightness falls from the air and Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
27 Using a word selected as a vivid detail as particular for general: the word "alas" in a stanza from Ben Johnson's Pan's Anniversary, which can refer to multiple subjects: sheep due to proximity, grass by rhyme, and shepherds (also by proximity), bringing out a range of implications.
Pan is our All, by him we breathe, we live,
We move, we are;...
But when he frowns, the sheep, alas,
The shepherds wither, and the grass.
30 Other aspects of poetry that differentiate it from prose: for example meter, rhyme and rhythm, which allow the writer to convey a statement with non-colloquial syntax, to reorder words and produce different and more elaborate implications and ambiguities.
30ff Extended discussion on rhythm and it many uses and roles in creating ambiguity: how the pace of a line can make it seem exhilarating, a slower pace can demand sympathy or even produce a funereal tone; examples from Marlow's Tamburlane as well as Marlow's Dr. Faustus; see also Spencer and The Faerie Queene, the specific stanza metric structure he uses (ababbcbcc) can produce a wide range of patterns and emotional states [I remember some this analysis of structure from my English literature undergraduate days!] The first four lines are a simple quatrain, but then the repeated "b" line can do a few different things: it can surprise the reader, emphasize something, add an afterthought, etc; the second quatrain then ends with a "c" couplet which also can do different things, etc.
34ff On ambiguities in Sir Phillip Sydney's work Ye Goatherd Gods from The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; on the monotony and repetition of words like mountains, valleys, forests, music, evening, morning, "with something of the aimless multitudinousness of the sea on a rock"; [!] on the various ambiguous meanings of these words: mountains can be "haunts of Pan for lust and Diana for chastity" and valleys "hold nymphs to which you may appeal, and yet are the normal places where you live" and so on; see also the deliberate misprint of the word mourning in the line "Who where she went bore in her forehead mourning" in the second-to-last stanza, which completes the sort of crescendo in the poem itself, etc.
38 Also note the value of specific form limitations: how it can free up tremendous feeling, emotion and other effects. "And limited as this form may be, the capacity to accept a limitation so unflinchingly, the capacity to even conceive so large a form as a unit of sustained feeling, is one that has been lost since that age." [Notice that modern poetry typically doesn't have any form or formalized structure at all, it's almost like we've become unable to handle the demands of traditional English poetical structures (like the sonnet form, but also even metric structures like iambic pentameter, etc.) as our culture becomes more and more hypocognizant.]
38ff Dramatic irony: referring back to the example from Macbeth on page 18, also an example from Deirdre of the Sorrows by John Millington Synge (Irish playwright); on the play's backdrop of a tremendous storm; how the storm unifies the drama, creates an urgency, it also shows, ironically, the impotence of heroic action, and that all the troubles which are forecast to the main character have been foretold and are beyond her control, that you're exercising your will pointlessly "against a fatal and frankly alien heaven."
40 Again on the pathetic fallacy, where we commit the fallacy of ascribing pathos to inanimate objects (like nature for example): this is a type of ambiguity imposed upon the reader and it causes great "emotional reverberation."
43ff Examples of subdued irony; Portia's conceit about lead and coffins in The Merchant of Venice; also Menenius' strange speech about gangrene and what to do about it in Coriolanus; see also the Iliad where Helen has sorrow for bringing about the death of so many brave men, but then also pride in making tapestries of them. See also the quote "nothing will come of nothing" and "nothing can be made out of nothing" lines said by King Lear some 600 lines apart, first to Cordelia and another time to the Fool. Note that Shakespeare wrote plays already owned by his company and the actors already knew a great deal about them, thus these unusual verbal ironies separated by hundreds of lines of text might help actors from becoming bored with the play as they performed over and over again.
Chapter 2
["In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one."]
48 Three scales or dimensions "along which ambiguities may be spread out"
* The degree of logical or grammatical disorder
* The degree to which the apprehension of the ambiguity must be conscious
* The degree of psychological complexity concerned
48 "An example of a second type of ambiguity, in word or syntax, occurs when two or more meanings are resolved into one."
49 "It is impossible to avoid Shakespeare in these matters; partly because his use of language is of unparalleled richness and partly because it has received so much attention already; so that the inquiring student has less to do, is more likely to find what he is looking for, and has evidence that he is not spinning fancies out of his own mind."
49ff Examples from Macbeth, also Sonnets 93, 95 as well as Sonnets 32 and 13. Note how phrases or portions of given lines can refer to either the sentence before or after it, as yet another aspect of the ambiguity.
52 "Sometimes the ambiguous phrase is a relative clause, with 'that' omitted, which is able to appear for a moment as an independent sentence on its own, before it is fitted into the grammar." See Sonnet 31:
Their images I lov'd, I view in thee,
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.
54-57 See Sonnet 16, featuring the phrase "lines of life" with a wide range of ambiguous meanings, everything from your personal appearance, time's wrinkles on one's face, one's line or lineage or descendants, lines drawn with a pencil or pen or in writing, or the lines of a poem, or one's destiny as in lifelines in palmistry; thus leading to a bunch of different possible interpretations of what this poem actually means. "Ambiguities of this sort may be divided into those which, once understood, remain an intelligible unit in the mind; those in which the pleasure belongs to the act of working out and understanding, which must at each reading, though with less labour, be repeated; and those in which the ambiguity works best if it is never discovered. Which class any particular poem belongs to depends in part on your own mental habits and critical opinions, and I am afraid that for many readers who have the patience to follow out this last analysis, it will merely spoil what they had taken for a beautiful Sonnet by showing it to be much more muddled than they had realized." [!!]
59ff Looking at several quite striking and beautiful ambiguities in passages of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
68ff Moving to 18th century poets (who, per the author, would have liked to have thought there was no ambiguity in their poems and would be "horrified" that there were); the author tackles a stanza of The Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson, and shows all kinds of examples of ambiguous words and clauses.
70ff On "zeugma" and double meanings (see below for definition, but an example here would be "John and his license expired last week"). "Of course, the zeugma is not an eighteenth-century invention, but it was not handled before then with such neatness and consciousness, and had not the same air of being the normal process of thought." Showing various examples from Pope here. Some of these are wittier than others...
76 Examples from Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden, where words can either be verbs or participles: see sway'd, dissembl'd and delay'd in:
Thus long have I by Native Mercy sway'd,
My Wrongs dissembl'd, my Revenge delay'd;
So willing to forgive th' Offending Age;
So much the Father did the King assuage.
"The heroic couplet in any case depends very much on participles for its compactness, so that an opportunity for this device often turns up."
77ff A whole ton of good examples of verbs/participle ambiguity from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.
79 Ambiguity because a line of poetry can go forward or backward, a line can refer to the line before or to the line after. See T.S. Eliot's poem Whispers of Immortality.
80ff Returning to Shakespeare: on debates about what words mean or what interpretations are acceptable or not; see the footnote in Arden's Shakespeare Complete Works on the word "rookie/rooky" as used in Macbeth. On the idea here that you can believe in a great many of alternative meanings at once; on emendations and corrections to Shakespeare, particularly those from the 18th century to clean up the text and restore it to "shipshape condition" were done because in Shakespeare's era, there were many misspellings or "non-stable" spellings, which came with different interpretations based on the spelling choices; see (mis)spellings in light of "Shakespeare's known sensibility for puns."
83: The author notes the Elizabethan tendency to mind "very little about spelling and punctuation," giving readers the need to grope for the right word, and "that only our snobbish oddity of spelling imposes on us the notion that one mechanical word, to be snapped up by the eye, must have been intended."
88ff On the use of "and" and "of" in ambiguity, see for example from King Lear:
"Blasts and fogs upon thee.
The untented woundings of a father's curse.
Pierce every sense about thee."
Note here the "wounds" may be a cause or effect of a curse, the curse might be uttered against the father or could be a curse on the father that is visited on his child, etc.
90ff A common Shakespearean linguistic form: "'the (noun) and (noun) of (noun)'; in which two, often apparently quite different, words are flung together, followed by a word which seems to be intended to qualify both of them."
"...were 't to renounce his Baptisme,
All Seales, and Symbols of redeemed sin:"
(Othello, II. iii. 356)
"...since this form demands that the reader should find a highest common factor of its first two nouns, it implies that he must open his mind to all their associations, so that the common factor may be as high as possible. That is, it is a powerful means of forcing him to adopt a poetical attitude towards."
91 See also here an interesting example from Hamlet Act 3, scene 3: "Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults" where Shakespeare gives us very little context here. "All we are given is two parts of the body and the Day of Judgment" as the author describes the context of the passage, which leaves the reader to do all sorts of imaginative work.
94 The author notes that Shakespeare uses this form so often that it's been drummed into our ears until we hardly notice it ("the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune," "the whips and scorns of time," etc), and yet "the form is rare before Shakespeare, and even in Shakespeare before Hamlet."
95-6 An example from the play All's Well That Ends Well that is a repeat of a synonym, but not quite a synonym once you think about it using this "and and of" format:
"Th' inaudible, and noiseless foot of time..."
Note that one word is Latinate, the other is Anglo-Saxon: the "slight difference" in meanings illustrates the many ways time's foot can be noiseless, but also soundless; it's a brooding and melancholy line and the implication of the difference between these two synonyms is in the background; also note the interesting footnote here where the author talks about how synonyms are used in legal documents in case there's a claim later that there's a difference in meaning--this is done to make sure that both Norman and Saxon groups understood the meanings in the contract. (!!!)
96ff After using synonyms in this "and-and-of" format you can also use oxymorons or tautology in this structure to produce ambiguity of different forms, see examples from Hamlet, from I Henry IV, etc.
99 Good example here of ambiguity conveying a variety of feelings:
"When I consider
What great creation, and what dole of honor
Flies where you bid it..."
(All's Well That Ends Well, II. iii. 170)
Note the reading "creation of honor" versus "dole of honor," which combines the meaning of "doling out" and the idea of "doleful," thus yielding two possible interpretation here: that "you make and break people according to your liking" or that "the honor you give people weighs them down."
101 An example from Macbeth of an imposed spectrum of meanings:
"But cruel are the Times, when we are Traitors
And do not know ourselves; when we hold Rumour
From what we feare, yet no not what we feare,
But float upon a wilde and violent Sea
Each way, and move."
(Macbeth, IV. ii. 18)
"He has described, as one living through such a time, its blind agitation and disorder, and then, calmed by the effort of description, gazes out over the Sea with a hushed and equable understanding; so that the whole description is called back into the mind, remembered as in stillness or as from a distance, by the last word. And here is being used, as so often, to connect two different ways of saying, two different attempts at saying, the same thing; but in this case one way takes over four lines of packed intensity and elaborate suggestion; the other takes one word, perhaps the flattest, most general, and least coloured in the English language. I am glad to close this chapter with so rich an example of an imposed wealth of meaning."
Chapter 3
[Ambiguity of the third type: "when two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously."]
102 Samson referring to Delilah as "That specious monster, my accomplished snare."
104ff Some of these examples are types of puns, some noticed by the reader right away, some not noticed except contextually; see the puns from Milton which have a certain "dignity" to them per the author, partly because they're derived "with an air of learning and command of language": see Milton's line about Elijah's ravens: "Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought."
106 Interesting comment here about the history of the English language, referring to the poetry of Marvell. "It is partly this tact which makes Marvell's puns charming and not detached from his poetry; partly something more impalpable, that he manages to feel Elizabethan about them, to imply that it was quite easy to produce puns and one need not worry about one's dignity in the matter. It became harder as the language was tidied up, and one's dignity was more seriously engaged. For the Elizabethans were quite prepared, for instance, to make a pun by a mispronunciation, would treat puns as mere casual bricks, requiring no great refinement, of which any number could easily be collected for a flirtation or indignant harangue. By the time English had become anxious to be 'correct' the great thing about a pun was that it was not a Bad Pun, that it satisfied the Unities and what not; it could stand alone and would expect admiration, and was a much more elegant affair."
107 "I shall now list four eighteenth century puns, in order of increasing self-consciousness."
109 "The nineteenth-century punster is quite another thing; to begin with he is not rude." The author goes through some of the works of Thomas Hood and has rather faint praise for it. An "airlessness to the humor."
111 Amusing reference here where the author quotes a poem by Hood while citing a place where "Shakespeare would have extracted a pun on 'kine'"
111ff On word associations that work and are used in the same way as puns, also used much more often. An example could be an allegory that may have many levels of interpretation: see for example a passage in Henry V (I. ii. 320) where Shakespeare compares men to bees, but also uses other interlocking allegories like bees humming in activity, "singing masons building roofs of gold," etc.
121 "With some violence both to language and sense" a great phraselet from Samuel Johnson, criticizing a poem by Thomas Gray.
125ff Third-type ambiguities which talk about one thing, then imply several ways of judging or feeling about that thing. From Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot:
"...who, high in Drury Lane,
Lulled by soft zephyrs through the broken pane,
Rhymes e'er he wakes, and prints before term ends,
Obliged by hunger, and request of friends."
This is both mocking and sympathetic to a poet who is essentially starving, probably isn't that talented, etc., the reader can't "be sure what proportions are intended" of these contradictory feelings Pope has toward the starving poet.
Chapter 4
[Ambiguity of the fourth type: "when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author."]
133 "An ambiguity of the fourth type occurs when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author. Evidently this is a vague enough definition which would cover much of the third type, and almost everything in the types which follow; I shall only consider here its difference from the third type."
134ff The author uses the example of Shakespeare's Sonnet 83, a "noble compound of eulogy and apology." See the first quatrain:
I never saw that you did painting need,
And therefore to your fair no painting set;
I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
The barren tender of a poet's debt:
Note here that by putting a comma after the word therefore in line 2, and removing a likely misprint comma at the end of exceed in line 3, the poem's meaning changes quite subtly. He goes on to show several other examples here: the word tender in line 4, the phrase poet's debt in line four, etc.
137ff See also Sonnet 17:
"Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
No yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts."
It's a eulogy, but also has the double meaning of "I should fail you, now that you have behaved so badly to me, if I tried to express you in poetry." This is in the context of Shakespeare's rudeness to, disappointment in, and frustration with his "W.H." (the Sonnets' intended audience/dedicatee) at various points in the sonnets. Also: "...these meanings are only worth detaching in so far as they are dissolved into the single mood of the poem" which conveys a whole texture of feelings of Shakespeare's complex mix of bitterness, tenderness and admiration of W.H.
139ff A Valediction, of Weeping by John Donne: quite a striking poem where we have two lovers crying but also there's a subtext of money and greed and being mercenary because of the metaphor of "thy face coins" tears. [!!] A subtle shift in the metaphor, which later implies that their love was bound to lead to unhappiness or even unfaithfulness. The author goes through a wide range of ambiguities in the following pages covering the three stanzas of this poem, it's quite a striking poem and I had never heard of it before.
145ff "But perhaps I am libelling this masterpiece." Empson spends four or five pages deeply analyzing the various ambiguities of this wonderful poem; I love how he is self-effacing right here.
146ff The Apparition by John Donne: How a poem leaves the reader "in doubt between two moods;" an "amused contempt" which gives the narrator an air of detached interest in literature, "and the scream of agony and hatred by which this is blown aside."
148ff Another example from Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins, where the ambiguity of the knowledge of death is both intuitive and intellectual: we sense it in both ways while reading the poem and yet the poet shows how they're also distinguished and separate as well. This poem is quite striking too!
149ff See also the ambiguity from Pope's Essay on Women which describes a hated, gross dowager: "What is so compelling about the passage is the combination within it of two sharply distinguished shapes of mind; the finicking precision with which the subject-matter is handled; the pity, bitterness, and terror with which the subject-matter must be conceived." "In the third type [of ambiguity], two such different moods would both be included, laid side by side, made relevant as if by a generalisation; in the fourth type they react with one another to produce something different from either, and here the reaction is an explosion." "...it is a parody of the manner in which a gallant complement would have been paid to the ladies, and it has a ghastly air of being romantic and charming." The lines "read like one blow after another."
151ff Finally from Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey: "Wordsworth was not an ambiguous poet" but he sometimes uses philosophical ambiguities: this is a striking analysis here where you can see how it can be read as Christian, Deist, even pantheistic--and the ambiguities allow all of these readings.
Chapter 5
["An ambiguity of the fifth type occurs when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it at all in his mind at once, so that, for instance, there is a simile which applies to nothing exactly, but lies half-way between two things when the author is moving from one to the other."]
155 Shakespeare continually does it:
Our natures do pursue
Like Rats that ravyn down their proper Bane
A thirsty evil, and when we drinke we die.
(Measure for Measure, I. ii)
156ff See also the poem Skylark by Shelly, where there's an ambiguity moving from the flight and sounds of a lark that is compared in various ambiguous ways to the light and rays of the moon or stars; there's also a set of tumbling metaphors of human cognition and perception: our ability to understand the ineffable, the romantic appreciation of our recognition of absolute beauty, our limited ability to do so, etc. The lark is of course a metaphor for the poet in Shelly's nomenclature, also it's a symbol of the spiritual life, and further there's a lot of indications that Keats' Ode to a Nightingale deeply influenced this poem. It's also interesting to see how Empson picks on T.S. Eliot's criticisms of Shelly's poem!
161 The author goes through other examples from Shelly of "fortunate muddle" where Shelly uses similes as transitions between a range of ideas, where he's "helplessly excited" by one thing at a time and then jumbles them all together.
163 See here Swinburne and his "stock associations" in Laus Veneris: just comparisons of various things. "The mixed epithets of two metaphors are combined as if in a single statement not intended to be analyzed but to convey a 'mood.'"
165 On "sleeping metaphors" and on the need, as a reader of later English poetry, to understand the various conceits traditionally used in English poetry of previous ages, so that even if a given conceit is not literally worked out in the poem, the reader can still feel it, and it can justify "apparent disorder" in a poem; "such poetry will often imply a direction of thought, or connection of ideas, by a transition from one sleeping metaphor to another. Later nineteenth-century poetry carried this delicacy to such a degree that it can reasonably be called decadent, because its effects depended on a tradition that its example was destroying." [Interesting thoughts on the definition of "decadent" from a cultural standpoint: to use something delicate in a such a way that leads to its destruction]
169ff Andrew Marvell, Elizabethan-era metaphysical poet, from his poem Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings:
"The gods themselves cannot their Joy conceal
But draw their Veils, and their pure Beams reveal:
Only they drooping Hymeneus note,
Who for sad Purple, tears his Saffron coat,
And trails his Torches through the Starry Hall
Reversed, at his Darling's Funeral.
"The young man has died on the eve of his wedding... the mood of comparison is caught before it has worked itself out" leaving the reader alone with elements loosely arranged, producing sorrow, reassurance and tenderness. But then again, once you read Marvell as a disciple of Milton, the allegories make themselves clear: saffron is the color of marriage; purple is for mourning. Hymen is also an allegorical figure, etc.
171 [This is a wonderful quote that really lets the reader understand what the author is trying to do in these various examples of analysis, he's apologetic yet very sincere.] "I feel some word of apology or explanation is needed as to why such a particularly fantastic analysis has to be given to lines of so direct to beauty, which seem so little tortured by the intellect, which are, in fact, early work, and rather carelessly phrased [this is one of Marvell's early poems and it's not done well]. The fact is that it is precisely in such cases, when there is an elaborate and definite technique at the back of the author's mind but he is allowing it to fall into the disorders that come most easily, when he has various metaphors in mind which he means to fit in somewhere, when the effect is something rather unintelligible but with a strong poetical colour, when the mere act of wondering what it means allows it to sink, in an uncensored form, into the reader's mind; it is in just such cases that fifth type ambiguities are most likely to be found, and are most necessary as explanations."
173 "[Andrew] Marvell was admired both by his own generation and by the nineteenth century; one may suspect that this was because they were able to read him in different ways."
175 Mention here of John Milton's poem Lycidas with the reference to the two-handed engine.
175 Henry Vaughan's "Joy of My Life While Left Me Here"; the author takes two couplets:
God's saints are shining lights; who stays
Here long must pass
O'er dark hills, swift streams, and steep ways
As smooth as glass.
The author writes, "One does not separate them in one's mind; it is the Romantic Movement's technique; dark hair, tidal water, landscape of dusk, are dissolved in your mind, as often in dreams, into an apparently direct sensory image which cannot be attached to any of the senses."
Chapter 6
{"An ambiguity of the sixth type occurs when a statement says nothing, by tautology, by contradiction, or by irrelevant statements; so that the reader is forced to invent statements of his own and they are liable to conflict with one another."]
176ff See Moses speaking to the Lord, saying "Thou has not delivered thy people at all" although literally the quote is "Delivering thou has not delivered" in a more direct translation, thus it yields an inherent contradiction based on an idiom in Hebrew and the reader can derive all sorts of implied meanings to this phrase; also we see this kind of contradiction when used in jokes, the author goes over various examples of this from Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm ("Zuleika was not strictly beautiful."... "She had no waist to speak of." etc.) leaving readers thinking "...it is not obvious what we are meant to believe at the end of it."
178ff The example of the love scene between Troilus and Cressida (see III. ii. 141ff) with a similar reaction from the reader.
182ff Ambiguity of the sixth type by tautology: where there is a pun used twice, once in each sense, and a fog of the complete ambiguity will then arise from a doubt which meaning goes with which word. See George Herbert's poem Affliction:
Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town,
Thou didst betray me to a lingering book,
And wrap me in a gown.
I was entangled in the world of strife
Before I had the power to change my life.
The "gown" here is Cambridge, not in the sense of joining the church; he was betrayed into a life of contemplation, but then also entangled into a life of action, and he's doubtful which he would have preferred; he wants to change his life but it's unclear in which direction.
183ff Also from the same poem, "Let me not love thee, if I love thee not." This is ambiguity by tautology, obviously, but it's also quite a beautiful line when thought of in terms of religious love or devotional love toward God.
185ff See Othello and the "It is the Cause" speech (V. ii); it's unclear what the "cause" is, likewise it's unclear what is "causing the tempest in his mind" but "we are listening to a mind withdrawn upon itself, and baffled by its own agonies."
187 "The strength of vagueness, in fact, is that it allows of secret ambiguity;" see the poem Who Goes with Fergus by W.B. Yeats where it's unclear what the implications are of Fergus leaving his position as king to seek out the druid in the woods; what is it that he actually rules? Should we brood about him or not? etc.
190ff "The examples of the sixth class convey an evasive frame of mind; they show the author feeling that he will lose the attitude he is expressing if he looks at it too closely" and "they assume that the reader understands a great deal already, and that he is able to guess by sympathy the way the contradiction must be resolved."
Chapter 7
["An example of a seventh type of ambiguity... occurs when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer's mind."]
192 Metaphorically the author describes it as a check pattern where "neither color is the ground on which the other is placed; it is at once an indecision and a structure, like the symbol of the Cross."
193 Opposites used in Freudian terminology which "could be employed with profit for the understanding of poetry."
193-4 "The study of Hebrew, by the way, and the existence of English Bibles with alternatives in the margin, may have had influence on the capacity of English for ambiguity... This is of interest because Hebrew, having very unreliable tenses, extraordinary idioms, and a strong taste for puns, possesses all the poetical advantages of a thorough primitive disorder." Note also the early Egyptians used the same sign for young and old, "When a primitive Egyptian saw a baby he at once thought of an old man, and he had to learn not to do this as his language became more civilised. This certainly shows the process of attaching a word to an object as something extraordinary; nobody would do it if his language did not make him."
195 Examples of relational opposites where you can't know one without the other. (A "restive" horse.)
196 A quote here from Dante's Inferno basically referring to part of their journey where it felt like they had to return back to hell all over again.
197 On how the contradictions are up to the reader and if they don't make sense it's the reader's fault. [!] "Since it is the business of the reader to extract the meanings useful to him and ignore the meanings he thinks foolish, it is evident that contradiction is a powerful literary weapon."
202 A very rich quotelet from from Macbeth Act IV: "Receive what cheer you may, the Night is long, that never finds the Day." Here "receive what cheer you may" can be an imperative or prepositional phrase; death is a long night that will never "find day"; Macbeth may kill us or we may kill him; also implying villains are punished in the end; also the effect is cheerful enough but with an overtone that one can't change the length of a night, meaning that human affairs are brief and uncertain, thus don't become agitated about them.
205ff On negatives or double negatives as a form of ambiguity: See Keats and Ode to Melancholy: "No, no; go not to Lethe; neither twist" where all the negatives obviously show that somebody (or the poet himself) must have wanted to go there very much. See also Shakespeare's casual use of the negative to imply the opposite. "There's not a shirt and a half in all my company" or "Their lives not three good men unhanged in all England, and one of them is fat and grows old."
209ff From To Althea, From Prison by Richard Lovelace
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage.
The author points out the paradox of the negation, that these things don't make a prison, but then the word "that" is used instead of "those" so then is "a hermitage" the prison? "It is curious to read 'those' instead of that, and see how the air of wit evaporates and general carelessness becomes a preacher's settled desire to convince. If you read 'them' there is a further shift because the metre becomes prose; sentiment might be by Bunyon, and one wonders if it is at all true."
211ff Example of negatives used to convey ambiguity in Ophelia's song to Queen Gertrude in Hamlet.
214ff "Keats often used ambiguities of this type to convey a dissolution of normal experience into intensity of sensation." See for example Ode to Melancholy, which basically says don't abandon yourself to melancholy or you will lose the sensation of incipient melancholia. [!] Or, "do not achieve death, or you can no longer live in its shadow." And also note the central metaphor of the poem which unites the antithesis of melancholy and joy.
217ff Richard Crashaw and his poem Hymn To the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa: here he groups religious themes with sexual themes, context that defines two situations as opposites; thus the seventh type of ambiguity: two opposites are held together and allowed to reconcile themselves; there's the overt metaphor of Christ as her [St. Teresa's] spouse but with "a strange mixture of feeling"; the author here is defending himself against an accusation of making all this into a "dirty joke"; rather, Crashaw literally thought this way, and it was a way for him to free "his virtue from the Puritan sense of shame"... "One must not say that Crashaw described a sensual form of mysticism, only that he was content to use sexual terms for his mystical experiences, because they were the best terms that he could find." Several examples to follow here of various less-ambiguous-than-you-would-think examples of juxtaposed sexual imagery and Christian spirituality. "...it draws its strength from a primitive system of ideas in which the uniting of opposites (of saviour and criminal, for instance) is of peculiar importance." See also a quatrain where Crashaw translates the Dies Irae where there's a pun on defecation and bowels: a very strange juxtaposition of something gross with the purest spirituality.
224ff "I shall end this chapter with a more controlled and intelligible example from George Herbert, where the contradictory impulses that are held in equilibrium by the doctrine of atonement may be seen in a luminous juxtaposition."
226ff On George Herbert and his poem The Sacrifice: "a doctrinal poem" with "a magnificence he never excelled." The poem is about the crucifixion from the perspective of Jesus himself, and it talks about the metaphor of destroying the Temple of Jerusalem and raising it again later; there's a unification of Jesus being a Jew yet being killed by Jews, etc. This is quite a good and affecting poem.
Chapter 8
234 "I must devote a final chapter to some remarks about what I have been doing; about the conditions under which ambiguity is proper, about the degree to which the understanding of it is of immediate importance, and about the way in which it is apprehended."
234 On how words have denotations (or meanings) and connotations (associations and relations to other words); noting that denotations imply or indicate a sort of asceticism (restriction of meaning to what it means), while connotations are a sort of hedonism (many meanings as needed, as wanted); these are conflicting forces in language. [Interesting idea here!]
236 On using ambiguity improperly: "one is tempted to set down a muddle in the hope that it will convey the meaning more immediately." [Basically, it's cheating if you throw a lot of paint at the wall and expect your readers to "see" something in it.]
236 Empson gives an example of a newspaper headline "Italian Assassin Bomb Plot Disaster" and discusses the various potential meanings/uses of each word, the grammar (which is ambiguous itself), and how the headline is even somewhat poetic.
239ff He goes through an example here of how we apprehend and gets into sort of a metaphysical discussion of how we look at words and yet think sort of probabilistically about the syntax: we as readers are ready to change it around as necessary, especially in poetry.
247 Quite a good quote here on requirements for reading and analyzing poetry. "They [readers] must possess a fair amount of equilibrium or fairly strong defenses; they must have the power first of reacting to a poem sensitively and definitely (one may call that feminine) then, having fixed the reaction, properly stained, on a slide, they must be able to turn the microscope on to it with a certain indifference and without smudging it with their fingers; they must be able to prevent their new feelings of the same sort from interfering with the process of understanding the original ones (one may call that 'masculine') and have enough to detachment not to mind what their sources I'm satisfaction may turn out to be."
249ff On two sorts of literary critic: the appreciative and the analytical: "the difficulty is that they have all got to be both." "An appreciator produces literary effects similar to the one he is appreciating... perhaps by using longer and plainer language... his version is more intelligible than the original... Having been shown what to look for, they [readers] are intended to go back to the original and find it there for themselves." The analyst critic works differently: he sets out to explain in terms of the reader's experience why a work has the effect on him that is assumed. "He is not repeating the effect; he may even be preventing it from happening again."
250ff Interesting discussion here on what one could call the author's aesthetic for literary criticism: what form it should take, how it should be done, how it should be explained (plainly, using "intellectually handy terms" and avoiding hinting at things, avoiding arrogance or snobbery). Also on the idea of identifying machinery to express distinctions in poetry: the author also notes that sometimes he needs to look up words in order to express these distinctions, but he knew them already in his mind, otherwise how could he look them up in the first place? On describing the idea that while you need a certain way to say something, it isn't always obvious how to say that something.
256 "I should claim, then, that for those who find this book contains novelties, it will make poetry more beautiful, without ever having to remember the novelties, or endeavor to apply them. It seems a sufficient apology for many niggling pages."
Vocab:
Tempus edax rerum: "time, that devours all things" (literally: "time, gluttonous of things", edax: adjectival form of the verb edo to eat)
Scoptophile: one who takes great pleasure in looking (at an object or a person)
Gongorism: a literary style characterized by studied obscurity and by the use of various ornate devices (Spanish: gongorismo, from Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1561-1627)
Zeugma: a type of double meaning; a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts)
Nescience: a synonym for ignorance, but with the connotation of a less active form of ignorance, a simple "not knowing" rather than an active ignoring of something
Agora: (in ancient Greece) a public open space used for assemblies and markets
Orrery: a mechanical model of the solar system, or of just the sun, earth, and moon, used to represent their relative positions and motions
Otiose: serving no practical purpose or result
Expatiate: speak or write at length or in detail
Unshriven: unconfessed; unabsolved of sins; also, effectively unabsolved
Dies Irae: a Latin hymn sung in a mass for the dead
Oratio Obliqua: Indirect speech, reported speech, indirect discourse; the practice, common in all Latin historical writers, of reporting spoken or written words indirectly, using different grammatical forms.
To Read:
William Empson: The Structure of Complex Worlds
Edith Sitwell's poetry
Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne
Works of John Donne, see in particular A Validiction, of Weeping
John Millington Synge: Dierdre of the Sorrows (play)
John Milton: Lycidas [note specifically the conceit of the "two-handed engine"]