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OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
'''Seven Types Of Ambiguity '''


SEVEN TYPES'OF AMBIGUITY
by William Empson


Seven Types Of Ambiguity
= Metadata =


William Empson
* Copyright: 1949  
 
* Publisher: Chatto and Windus, LONDON  
1949  
* FIRST EDITION 1930  
 
* SECOND EDITION (REVISED AND RE-SET) 1947  
Chatto and Windus  
* REPRINTED 1949  
 
LONDON  
 
FIRST EDITION 1930  
 
SECOND EDITION (REVISED AND RE-SET) 1947  
 
REPRINTED 1949  
 
* PUBLISHED BY
** Chatto and Windus, LONDON
** Clarke, Irwin and Co. Ltd, TORONTO
 
 
 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


= Frontmatter =


== Contents ==


Contents  
Contents  


CHAPTER I Page i
=== [[Empson1949_ch01|CHAPTER I]] ===


The sorts of meaning to be considered; the problems of  
The sorts of meaning to be considered; the problems of  
Line 41: Line 27:
on Dramatic Irony (p. 38).  
on Dramatic Irony (p. 38).  


CHAPTER II Pagpfi
=== [[Empson1949_ch02|CHAPTER II]] ===


In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings  
In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings  
Line 49: Line 35:
Shakespeare and on his form 'The A and B of C.'  
Shakespeare and on his form 'The A and B of C.'  


.**
=== [[Empson1949_ch03|CHAPTER III]] ===
CHAPTER III Page 102


The condition for third-type ambiguity is that two apparently  
The condition for third-type ambiguity is that two apparently  
Line 60: Line 45:
cussion of the criterion for this type.  
cussion of the criterion for this type.  


CHAPTER IV Page 133
=== [[Empson1949_ch04|CHAPTER IV]] ===


In the fourth type the alternative meanings combine to make  
In the fourth type the alternative meanings combine to make  
Line 69: Line 54:
to achieve this type.  
to achieve this type.  


 
=== [[Empson1949_ch05|CHAPTER V]] ===
 
vi CONTENTS
 
CHAPTER V ' Page 155


The fifth type is a fortunate confusion, as when the author is  
The fifth type is a fortunate confusion, as when the author is  
Line 82: Line 63:
route; examples from Marvell and Vaughan.  
route; examples from Marvell and Vaughan.  


CHAPTER VI Page 176
=== [[Empson1949_ch06|CHAPTER VI]] ===


In the sixth type what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and  
In the sixth type what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and  
Line 90: Line 71:
on nineteenth-century technique.  
on nineteenth-century technique.  


CHAPTER VII Page 192
=== [[Empson1949_ch07|CHAPTER VII]] ===


The seventh type is that of full contradiction, marking a divi-  
The seventh type is that of full contradiction, marking a divi-  
Line 98: Line 79:
Hopkins, and Herbert.  
Hopkins, and Herbert.  


CHAPTER VIII Page 234
=== [[Empson1949_ch08|CHAPTER VIII]] ===


General discussion of the conditions under which ambiguity is  
General discussion of the conditions under which ambiguity is  
Line 105: Line 86:
ously. Not all ambiguities are relevant to criticism ; example  
ously. Not all ambiguities are relevant to criticism ; example  
from Jonson (p. 242). Discussion of how verbal analysis  
from Jonson (p. 242). Discussion of how verbal analysis  
should be carried out and what it can hope to achieve.  
should be carried out and what it can hope to achieve.
 
 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
 
THE first and only previous edition of this book was pub-
lished sixteen years ago. Till it went out of print, at about
the beginning of the war, it had a steady sale though a smajl
one ; and in preparing a second edition the wishes of the buyers
ought to be considered. Many of them will be ordering a
group of books on this kind of topic, for a library, compiled
from bibliographies; some of them maybe only put the book
on their list as an awful warning against taking verbal analysis
too far. Anyway, such a buyer wants the old book, not a new
one, even if I could make it better. On the other hand, there was
obviously room to tidy up the old one, and I would not want to
reprint silently anything I now think false.
 
It seemed the best plan to work the old footnotes into the
text, and make clear that all the footnotes in this edition are
second thoughts written recently. Sometimes the footnotes dis-
agree with the text above them; this may seem a fussy process,
but I did not want to cut too much. 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. However, I have cut
out a few bits of analysis (hardly ever without a footnote to say
so) because they seemed trivial and likely to distract the reader's
attention from the main point of the passage ; I have tried to
make some of the analyses clearer, and occasionally written in
connecting links; the sources of the quotations needed putting
in; there were a lot of small proof corrections to make; and
some of the jokes which now seem to me tedious have gone. I
do not think I have suppressed quietly any bit of analysis which
would be worth disagreeing over. There is now an index and
a summary o^ chapters.
 
I was surprised there was so little of the book I should prefer
to change. My attitude in writing it was that an honest man
erected the ignoring of * tact ' into a point of honour. Apart from
 
vii
 
 
 
viii SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
trailing my coat about minor controversies, I claimed at the start
that I would use the term 'ambiguity' to mean anything I liked,
and repeatedly told the reader that the distinctions between the
Seven Types which he was asked to study would not be worth
the attention of a profounder thinker. As for the truth of the
theory which was to be stated in an irritating manner, I remember
saying to Professor I. A. Richards in a * supervision' (he was then
my teacher and gave me crucial help and encouragement) that all
the possible mistakes along this line ought to be heaped up and
published, so that one could sit back and wait to see which were
the real mistakes later on. Sixteen years later I find myself
prepared to stand by nearly the whole heap. I have tried to clear
the text of the gratuitous puzzles of definition and draw attention
to the real ones.
 
The method of verbal analysis is of course the main point of
the book, but there were two cross-currents in my mind leading
me away from it. At that time Mr. T. S. Eliot's criticism in
particular, and the Zeitgeist in general, were calling for a re-
consideration of the claims of the nineteenth-century poets so
as to get them into perspective with the newly discovered merits
of Donne, Marvell, and Dryden. It seemed that one could only
enjoy both groups by approaching them with different and in-
compatible presuppositions, and that this was one of the great
problems which a critic ought to tackle. My feeling now is not
so much that what I wrote about the nineteenth century was
wrong as that I was wrong in tackling it with so much effort and
preparation. There is no need to be so puzzled about Shelley.
But I believe that this looking for a puzzle made me discover
something about Swinburne, and I did not treat the Keats Ode
to Melancholy as a dated object.
 
The second cross-current was the impact of Freud. Some
literary critics at the time were prepared to 'collaborate* with
the invading psycho-analysts, whereas the honest majority who
were prepared to fight in the streets either learned fire- watching
technique or drilled with the Home Guard. This problem, too,
I think, has largely settled itself in the intervening years, and I
can claim that my last example of the last type of ambiguity was
not concerned with neurotic disunion but with a fully public
theological poem. However, I want now to express my regret
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY ix
 
that the topical interest of Freud distracted me from giving
adequate representation in the seventh chapter to the poetry of
straightforward mental conflict, perhaps not the best kind of
poetry, but one in which our own age has been very rich. I
had not read Hart Crane when I published the book, and I
had had the chance to. Mr. T. S. Eliot, some while ago
(speaking as a publisher), remarked that poetry is a mug's
game, and this is an important fact about modern poets.
When Tennyson retired to his study after breakfast to get
on with the Idylls there had to be a hush in the house because
every middle-class household would expect to buy his next pub-
lication. I believe that rather little good poetry has been written
iu recent years, and that, because it is no longer a profession in
which ability can feel safe, the effort of writing a good bit of
verse has in almost every case been carried through almost as a
clinical thing; it was done only to save the man's own sanity.
Exceedingly good verse has been written under these conditions
in earlier centuries as well as our own, but only to externalise
the conflict of an individual. It would not have been sensible
to do such hard work unless the man himself needed it. How-
ever, if I tried to rewrite the seventh chapter to take in contem-
porary poetry I should only be writing another book.
 
I want here to consider some theoretical points which have
been raised in criticisms of the book; and I am sorry if I have
missed or failed to keep some powerful attack which ought to be
answered. I have remembered a number of minor complaints
which I have tried to handle in the textual corrections or the
footnotes. The fundamental arguments against my approach,
I think, were all put briefly and clearly by Mr. James Smith in
a review in the Criterion for July 1931; so it is convenient to
concentrate on that article, though many other critics expressed
similar views. To some extent I think these objections were
answered in the text, but obviously they were not answered
clearly or strongly enough, and if I have anything fresh to say
I ought to say it now.
 
He made objections to my uses of the term * ambiguity ' which
I have tried to handle in re-editing; but I have also to answer
this sentence: * We do not ordinarily accuse a pun, or the better
type of conceit, of being ambiguous because it manages to say
 
 
 
x SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
two things at onre; its essence would seem to be conciseness
rather than ambiguity.' We call it ambiguous, I think, when we
recognise that there could be a_pnzzle^ a s to what the author
meant, in that alternative views might be taken without sheer'
"mfsreading. It a pun is quite obvious it would not 6f dinarity
"be caflecfambiguous, because there is no room for puzzling. But
if an irony is calculated to deceive a section of its readers I think
it would ordinarily be called ambiguous, even by a critic who has
never doubted its meaning. No doubt one could say that even
the most obvious irony is a sort of playing at deception, but it
may imply that only a comic butt could be deceived, and this
makes a different sort of irony. Cardinal Newman found
Gibbon ambiguous, we must suppose, because some remarks
by the Cardinal imply that he did not know that Gibbon meant
to be ironical. But most readers would consider the ironies of
Gibbon unambiguous, though possessed of a 'double meaning/
because they would feel that no one could be deceived by them.
Thus the criterion for the ordinary use of the word is that some-
body might be puzzled, even if not yourself. Now I was fre-
quently puzzled in considering my examples, though not quite
in this way. I felt sure that the example was beautiful and that
I had, broadly speaking, reacted to it correctly. But I did not
at all know what had happened in this ' reaction ' ; I did not know
why the example was beautiful. And it seemed to me that I was
able in some cases partly to explain my feelings to myself by
teasing out the meanings of the text. Yet these meanings when
teased out (in a major example) were too complicated to be
remembered together as if in one glance of the eye ; they had to
be followed each in turn, as possible alternative reactions to the
passage ; and indeed there is no doubt that some readers some-
times do only get part of the full intention. In this way such a
passage has to be treated as if it were ambiguous, even though
it may be said that for a good reader it is only ambiguous (in the
ordinary sense of the term) while he is going through an un-
necessary critical exercise. Some critics do not like to recognise
this process because they connect it with Depth Psychology,
vhich they regard with fear. But it is ordinary experience that
our minds work like this ; that we can often see our way through
a situation, as it were practically, when it would be extremely
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY xi
 
hard to separate out all the elements of the judgment. Most
children can play catch, and few children are good at dynamics.
Or the way some people can do anagrams at one shot, and feel
sure the letters all fit, is a better illustration; because there the
analytic process is not intellectually difficult but only very
tedious. And it is clear that this process of seeing tiie thing as
a whole is particularly usual and important in language; most
people learn to talk, and they were talking grammar before
grammarians existed.
 
This is not to argue that some elemental and unscholarly
process is what is in question, nor that what has to be explained
always happens in a rapid glance of the eye. Indeed, what often
happens when a piece of writing is felt to offer hidden riches is
that one phrase after another lights up and appears as the heart
of it; one part after another catches fire, so that you walk about
with the thing for several days. To go through the experience
in question is then slower, not quicker, than the less inspiriting
process of reading an analysis of it; and the fact that we can
sometimes grasp a complex meaning quickly as a whole does not
prove that a radically different mode of thought (an intrusion of
the lower depths) is there to be feared.
 
This is meant as a sketch of the point of view which made
* ambiguity* seem a necessary key word ; of course, I do not deny
that the term had better be used as clearly as possible, and that
there is a use for a separate term 'double meaning/ for example
when a pun is not felt to be ambiguous ineffect. Tiut it could be
argued that, until you have done your analysis of the ambiguities,
you cannot be sure whether the total effect is ambiguous or not;
and that this forces you in some degree to extend the meaning
of the term. I wanted in any case to put such a sketch before
giving a longer quotation from Mr. James Smith's review, in
which his objections are more fundamental. As the book went
on, he said, there was an increasing proportion of examples
from plays :
 
The effect of the dramatic upon the poetic scale is almost sure
to be unfortunate. The first business of the student of drama, so
far as he is concerned with ambiguity, is historical ; he records that
situations are treacherous, that men are consciously or uncon-
sciously hypocritical, to such or such a degree. The student of
 
 
 
xii SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
poetry, on the other hand, has as his first business the passing of a
judgement of value. It is not his main, or even his immediate,
concern that a word can be interpreted, that a sentence can be con-
strued, in a large number of ways; if he make it his concern, there
is a danger that, in the enumeration of these ways, judgements of
value will be forgotten. And unless they are put in at the beginning
of an analysis they do not of their own account emerge at the end.
Quite a number of Mr. Empson 's analyses do not seem to have any
properly critical conclusion ; they are interesting only as revelations
of the poet's, or of Mr. Empson 's, ingenious mind. Further, some
of Mr. Empson 's analyses deal, not with words and sentences, but
with conflicts supposed to have raged within the author when he
wrote. Here, it seems to me, he has very probably left poetry
completely behind. . . .
 
There are a number of irrelevancies in Mr. Empson 's book, and
as in a measure they derive from, so probably in a measure they
increase, his vagueness as to the nature and scope of ambiguity.
Finding this everywhere in the drama, in our social experience, in
the fabric of our minds, he is led to assume it must be discoverable
everywhere in great poetry. I doubt whether the reader who re-
members his Sappho, his Dante, or the Lucy poems of Wordsworth
is even prepared to be convinced of this ; but even if he were he
could not be so until Mr. Empson had made his position much
clearer. Is the ambiguity referred to that of life is it a bundle of
diverse forces, bound together only by their co -existence ? Or is it
that of a literary device of the allusion, conceit, or pun, in one of
their more or less conscious forms? If the first, Mr. Empson 's
thesis is wholly mistaken ; for a poem is not a mere fragment of life ;
it is a fragment that has been detached, considered, and judged by
a mind. A poem is a noumenon rather than a phenomenon. If the
second, then at least we can say that Mr. Empson 's thesis is ex-
aggerated.
 
I thought this ought to be reprinted with the book, if only
because it puts clearly what many readers will feel. Other
reviewers made an illustrative point along the same line of
objection : that in learning a foreign language the great thing is
to learn to cut out the alternative meanings which are logically
possible ; you are always liable to bring them up till you have
'grasped the spirit' of the language, and then you know they
aren't meant. Of course, I don't deny that the method could lead
to a shocking amount of nonsense ; in fact, as a teacher of English
literature in foreign countries I have always tried to warn my
students off the book. It is clear that we have to exercise a good
deal of skill in cutting out implications that aren't wanted in
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY xiii
 
reading poems, and the proof of our succecs is that we are
actually surprised when they are brought out by a parody.
However, I recognised in the book that one does not want merely
irrelevant ambiguities, and I should claim to have had some
success in keeping them out. To be sure, the question how far
unintended or even unwanted extra meanings do in fact impose
themselves, and thereby drag our minds out of their path in
spite of our efforts to prevent it, is obviously a legitimate one ;
and some of the answers may be important. But it is not one
I was much concerned with in this book.
 
In the same way, when Mr. James Smith said that I often left
out the judgment of value he was of course correct. Many of
tne examples are only intended to show that certain techniques
have been widely used. Even in the fuller examples, where I
hope I have made clear what I feel about the poem as a whole,
I don't try to * make out a case ' for my opinion of its value. The
judgment indeed comes either earlier or later than the process
which I was trying to examine. You think the poem is worth
the trouble before you choose to go into it carefully, and you
know more about what it is worth when you have done so. It
might be argued that a study of the process itself is not really
* criticism ' ; but this change of name would not prove that there
is any fundamental fallacy in trying to study it. No doubt the
study would be done badly if there were wrong judgments
behind it, but that is another thing.
 
The distinction made by Mr. James Smith between the
dramatic situation and the judgment of the poet is, therefore, a
more fundamental objection. It seems to me one of those neces-
sary simplifications, without which indeed life could not go
forward, but which are always breaking down. Good poetry is
usually written from a background of conflict, though no doubt
more so in some periods than in others. The poet, of course, has
to judge what he has written and get it right, and his readers
and critics have to make what they can of it too. When Mr.
James Smith objected to my dealing with 'conflicts supposed to
have raged within the author* I think he was overplaying his
hand very seriously; he was striking at the roots of criticism,
not at me. If critics are not to put up some pretence of under-
standing the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn
 
 
 
xiv SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
themselves to contempt. And besides, the judgment of the
author may be wrong. Mr. Robert Graves (I ought to say in
passing that he is, so far as I know, the inventor of the method of
analysis I was using here) has remarked that a poem might
happen to survive which later critics called 'the best poem the
age produced/ and yet there had been no question of publishing
it in that age, and the author had supposed himself to have
destroyed the manuscript. As I remember, 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. This
has no bearing on any 'conflict* theory; it is only part of the
difficulty as to whether a poem is a noumenon or a phenomenon.
Critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be some*-
thing inspired which meant more than the poet knew.
 
The topic seems to me important, and I hope I may be
allowed to digress to illustrate it from painting. As I write
there is a grand semi-government exhibition of the painter
Constable in London, very ample, but starring only two big
canvases, both described as 'studies/ Constable painted them
only as the second of three stages in making an Academy
picture, and neither could nor would ever have exhibited them.
I do not know how they survived. They are being called by
some critics (quite wrongly, I understand) the roots of the
whole nineteenth-century development of painting. It seems
obvious to many people now that they are much better than
Constable's finished works, including the two that they are
'studies' for. However, of course, nobody pretends that they
were an uprush of the primitive or in some psychological way
'not judged* by Constable. When he got an idea he would
make a preliminary sketch on the spot, then follow his own
bent in the studio (obviously very fast), and then settle down on
another canvas to make a presentable picture out of the same
theme. 'My picture is going well/ he remarks in a letter, 'I
have got rid of most of my spottiness and kept in most of my
freshness.' You could defend the judgment of Constable by
saying that he betrayed his art to make a living, but this would
oe absurdly unjust to him; at least Constable would have re-
sented it, and he does not seem to have had any gnawing con-
viction that the spottiest version was the best one. Of course, the
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY xv
 
present fashion for preferring it may be wrong too ; the point
I am trying to make is that this final 'judgment* is a thing which
must be indefinitely postponed. Would Mr. James Smith say
that the 'study', which is now more admired than the finished
work, was a noumenon or a phenomenon ? I do not see an y way
out of the dilemma which would leave the profound truths he
was expressing much importance for a practical decision.
 
The strongest point of Mr. James Smith's criticism, I felt,
was the accusation that, owing to my vagueness about ambiguity,
I supposed it to exist everywhere in great poetry, whereas this
would obviously be false about Sappho, Dante, and Wordsworth
on Lucy. Oddly enough among the other reviewers at the time,
one chose a passage from Dante and another from Wordsworth
on Lucy to make a rather different point. They used the lines
they quoted as examples of the real ambiguity of great poetry,
a thing, they said, which underlay the superficial and finicking
ambiguities I had considered, and gave them whatever value
they had. These views are perhaps not really very unlike,
though I would feel more at home with the second. But it
seems clear that I ought to try to answer a question: What
claim do I make for the sort of ambiguity I consider here, and
is all good poetry supposed to be ambiguous ?
 
I think that it is ; but I am ready to believe that the methods
I was developing would often be irrelevant to the demonstration.
As I understand it, there is always in great poetry a feeling of
generalisation from a case which has been presented definitely;
there is always an appeal to a background of human experience
which is all the more present when it cannot be named. I do
not have to deny that the narrower chisel may cut more deeply
into the heart. What I would suppose is that, whenever a
receiver of poetry is seriously moved by an apparently simple
line, what are moving in him are the traces of a great part of his
past experience and of the structure of his past judgments.
Considering what it feels like to take real pleasure in verse, I
should think it surprising, and on the whole rather disagreeable,
if even the most searching criticism of such lines of verse could
find nothing whatever in their implications to be the cause of
so straddling a commotion and so broad a calm.
 
 
 
A* ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pro-
nounced, 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 tojhe same piece of language. 1 Sometimes,
especially in this firs^chapter, the word may be stretched ab-
surdly far, but it is descriptive because it suggests the analytical
mode of approach, and with that I am concerned.
 
In a sufficiently extended sense any prose statement could be
called ambiguous. In the first place it can be analysed. Thus,
' The brown cat sat on the red mat' may be split up into a series :
* This is a statement about a cat. The cat the statement is about
is brown/ and so forth. Each such simple statement may be
translated into a complicated statement which employs other
terms ; thus you are now faced with the task of explaining what
a * cat * is ; and each such complexity may again be analysed into
a simple series; thus each of the things that go to make up a
'cat' will stand in some spatial relation to the 'mat.' 'Explana-
tion,' by choice of terms, may be carried in any direction the
explainer wishes ; thus to translate and analyse the notion of ' sat '
might involve a course of anatomy; the notion of 'on' a theory
of gravitation. Such a course, however, would be irrelevant not
only to my object in this essay but to the context implied by the
statement, the person to whom it seems to be addressed, and the
purpose for which it seems to be addressed to him ; nor would
you be finding out anything very fundamental about the sentence
by analysing it in this way; you would merely be making another
sentence, stating the same fact, but designed for a different pur-
pose, context, and person. Evidently, the literary critic is much
concerned with implications of this last sort, and must regard
them as a main part of the meaning. There is a difference (you
 
1 In the first edition I made it c adds some nuance to the direct statement of
prose.' This, as was pointed out, begs a philosophical question and stretches
the term * a~ioiguity ' so far that it becomes almost meaningless. The new
phrase is not meant to be decisive but to avoid confusing the reader ; natur-
ally the question ot what would be the best definition of ' ambiguity ' (whether
the example in hand should be called ambiguous) crops up all through the
book.
 
 
 
* SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
may say that between thought and feeling) between the fact
stated and the circumstance of the statement, but very often you
cannot know one without knowing the other, and an apprehen-
sion of the sentence involves both without distinguishing between
them. Thus I should consider s on the same footing the two
facts about this sentence, that it is about a cat and that it is suited
to a child. And I should only isolate two of its * meanings,' to
form an ambiguity worth notice; it has contradictory associa-
tions, which might cause some conflict in the child who heard it,
in that it might come out of a fairy story and might come out of
Reading without Tears.
 
In analysing the statement made by a sentence (having, no
doubt, fixed on the statement by an apprehension of the implica-
tions of the sentence), one would continually be dealing with a
sort of ambiguity due to metaphors, made clear by Mr. Herbert
Read in English Prose Style \ because metaphor, more or less
far-fetched, more or less complicated, more or less taken for
granted (so as to be unconscious), is the normal mode of develop-
ment of a language. * Words used as epithets are words used to
analyse a direct statement,' whereas 'metaphor is the synthesis of
several units of observation into one commanding image; it is
the expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, nor by direct
statement, but by a sudden perception of an objective relation.'
One thing is said to be like another, and they have several differ-
ent properties in virtue of which they are alike. Evidently this,
as a verbal matter, yields more readily to analysis than the social
ambiguities I have just considered ; and I shall take it as normal
to the simplest type of ambiguity, which I am considering in this
chapter. The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be
called ambiguous or not, is that a word oi^a grammatical struc-
ture is effective in several ways at nnrp To take a famous
example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling, in
 
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,
 
but the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined
monastery choirs are places in which to sing, becauce +hey involve
sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into
knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a
sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 3
 
coloured with stained glass and painting like howers and leaves,
because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls col-
oured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic
charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare's
feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various 'sociological
and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries ;
fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in
their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the
simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the
line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not know-
ing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this
is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and
the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of
poetry.
 
Such a definition of the first type of ambiguity covers almost
everything of literary importance, and this chapter ought to be
my longest and most illuminating, but it is the most difficult.
The important meanings of this sort, as may be seen from the
example about the cat, are hard to isolate, or to be sure of when
you have done so ; and there is a sort of meaning, the sort that
people are thinking of when they say * this poet will mean more
to you when you have had more experience of life/ which is
hardly in reach of the analyst at all. They mean by this not so
much that you will have more information (which could be given
at once) as that the information will have been digested; that
you will be more experienced in the apprehension of verbal
subtleties or of the poet's social tone; that you will have become
the sort of person that can feel at home in, or imagine, or extract
experience from, what is described by the poetry; that you will
have included it among the things you are prepared to apprehend.
There is a distinction here of the implied meanings of a sentence
into what is to be assimilated at the moment and what must
already be part of your habits; in arriving at the second of these
the educator (that mysterious figure) rather than the analyst would
be helpful. In a sense it cannot be explained in language, be-
cause to a person who does not understand it any statement of it
is as difficult as the original one, while to a person who does
understand it a statement of it has no meaning because no
purpose.
 
 
 
4 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Meanings of tLis kind, indeed, are conveyed, but they are
conveyed much more by poets than by analysts; that is what
poets are for, and why they are important. For poetry has
powerful means of imposing its own assumptions, and is very
independent of the mental habits of the reader; one might trace
its independence to the ease with which it can pass from the one
to the other of these two sorts of meaning. A single word,
dropped where it comes most easily, without being stressed, and
as if to fill out the sentence, may signal to the reader what he is
meant to be taking for granted; if it is already in his mind the
word will seem natural enough and will not act as an unnecessary
signal. Once it has gained its point, on further readings, it will
take for granted that you always took it for granted ; only very
delicate people are as tactful in this matter as the printed page.
Nearly all statements assume in this way that you know some-
thing but not everything about the matter in hand, and would
tell you something different if you knew more; but printed
commonly differ from spoken ones in being intended for a
greater variety of people, and poetical from prosaic ones in
imposing the system of habits they imply more firmly or more
quickly.
 
As examples of the things that are taken for granted in this
way, and assume a habit, rather than a piece of information, in
the reader, one might give the fact that a particular section of the
English language is being used; the fact that English is being
used, which you can be conscious of if you can use French ; the
fact that a European language is used, which you can be conscious
of if you can use Chinese. The first of these 'facts' is more
definite than it sounds ; a word in a speech which falls outside the
expected vocabulary will cause an uneasy stir in all but the sound-
est sleepers; many sermons use this with painful frankness.
Evidently such a section is defined by its properties rather than
by enumeration, and so alters the character of the words it
includes; for instance, one would bear it in mind when con-
sidering whether the use of a word demands that one should
consider its derivation. Regional or dialect poets a5 likely to
use words flatly from that point of view. No single example of so
delicate and continuous a matter can be striking; I shall take one
at random out of the Synge Deirdre, to make clear that a word
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 5
 
need not be unpoetical merely because its meaning has been
limited :
 
DEIRDRE. ... It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and
richest, if it's for a short space only.
NAISI. And we've a short space only to be triumphant and brave.
 
The language here seems rich in implications ; it certainly carries
much feeling and conveys a delicate sense of style. But if one
thinks of the Roman or medieval associations of triumphant ', even
of its normal use in English, one feels a sort of unexplained warn-
ing that these are irrelevant; the word here is a thin counter
standing for a notion not fully translated out of Irish; it is used
to eke out that alien and sliding speech-rhythm, which puts no.
weight upon its single words. 1
 
The process of becoming accustomed to a new author is very
much that of learning what to exclude in this way, and this first
of the three 'facts,' hard as it may be to explain in detail, is one
with which appreciative critics are accustomed to deal very
effectively. But the other two are more baffling; one can say
little about the quality of a language, if only because the process
of describing it in its own language is so top-heavy, and the words
of another language will not describe it. The English preposi-
tions, for example, from being used in so many ways and in
combination with so many verbs, have acquired not so much a
number of meanings as a body of meaning continuous in several
dimensions; a tool-like quality, at once thin, easy to the hand,
and weighty, which a mere statement of their variety does not
convey. In a sense all words have a body of this sort ; none can
be reduced to a finite number of points, and if they could the
points could not be conveyed by words.
 
Thus a word may have several distinct meanings; several
meanings connected with one another; several meanings which
need one another to complete their meaning; or several meanings
which unite together so that the word means one relation or one
process. This is a scale which might be followed continuously.
'Ambiguity' itself can mean an indecision as to what you mean,
an intentio^ to mean several things, a probability that one or
other or both of two things has been meant, and the fact that a
 
1 Not a clear example, and I am not sure that what I said is true ; but a
borderline example was needed here to show that fine shades can be concerned.
 
 
 
6 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
statement has several meanings. 1 It is useful to be able to separ-
ate these if you wish, but it is not obvious that in separating them
at any particular point you will not be raising more problems than
you solve. Thus I shall often use the ambiguity of 'ambiguity,'
and pronouns like ' one/ to make statements covering both reader
and author of a poem, when I want to avoid raising irrelevant
problems as to communication. To be less ambiguous would be
like analysing the sentence about the cat into a course of anatomy.
In the same way the words of the poet will, as a rule, be more
justly words, what they represent will be more effectively a unit
in the mind, than the more numerous words with which I shall
imitate their meaning so as to show how it is conveyed.
 
And behind this notion of the word itself, as a solid tool rathe/
than as a collection of meanings, must be placed a notion of the
way such a word is regarded as a member of the language ; this
seems still darker and less communicable in any terms but its
own. For one may know what has been put into the pot, and
recognise the objects in the stew, but the juice in which they are
sustained must be regarded with a peculiar respect because they
are all in there too, somehow, and one does not know how they
are combined or held in suspension. One must feel the respect
due to a profound lack of understanding for the notion of a
potential, and for the poet's sense of the nature of a language.
 
These examples of the 'meanings' of an English sentence
should make clear that no explanation, certainly no explanation
written in English, can be conceived to list them completely ; and
that there may be implications (such as I should call meanings)
of which a statement would be no use. Neither of these are
objections to my purpose, because I can assume that my readers
already understand and enjoy the examples I shall consider, and
I am concerned only to conduct a sufficient analysis of their
enjoyment to make it seem more understandable.
 
It is possible that there are some writers who write very largely
with this sense of a language as such, so that their effects would
be almost out of reach of analysis. Racine always seems to me to
write with the wholejveight of the French language^ to remind
 
1 It would seem pedantic to alter the phrase ' has several meanings,* but
it is treacherous. If the simplest statement has a subject find a predicate it
may be said to include two meanings. There would be no point in calling it
ambiguous unless it gave room for alternative reactions.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 7
 
one always of the latent assumptions of French in a way that I
am not competent to analyse in any case, but that very possibly
could not be explained in intelligible terms. Dryden is a corre-
sponding English figure in this matter; Miss Gertrude Stein,
too, at this point, implores th^ passing tribute of a sigh. To
understand their methods one might have to learn a great deal
about the mode of action of language which is not yet known, and
it might always be quicker to use habit than analysis, to learn the
language than to follow the explanation.
 
I propose, then, to consider a series of definite and detachable
ambiguities, iu which several large and crude meanings can be
separated out, and to arrange them in order of increasing distance
from simple statement and logical exposition. There is much
danger of triviality in this, because it requires a display of in-
genuity such as can easily be used to escape from the conscious-
ness of one's ignorance; because it ignores the fact that the
selection of meanings is more important to the poet than their
multitude, and harder to understand; and because it gives no
means of telling how much has been done by meanings latent in
the mode of action of the language, which may be far more
elaborate and fundamental than those that can be written up.
My methods can only be applied at intervals ; I shall frequently
pounce on the least interesting aspect of a poem, as being large
enough for my forceps ; and the atoms which build up the com-
pounds I analyse will always be more complex than they. But
in so far as anything can be said about this mysterious and im-
portant matter, to say it ought not to require apology.
 
I shall almost always take poems that I admire, and write with
pleasure about their merits ; you might say that, from the scien-
tific point of view, this is a self-indulgence, and that as much is
to be learnt from saying why bad poems are bad. This would be
true if the field were of a known size ; if you knew the ways in
which a poem might be good, there would be a chance of seeing
why it had failed. But, in fact, you must rely on each particular
poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good ; if it
fails you cannot know its object ; and it would be trivial to explain
why it had tailed at something it was not trying to achieve. Of
course, it may succeed in doing something that you understand
and hate, and you may then explain your hatred; but all you can
 
 
 
8 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
explain about the poem is its success. And even then, you can
only have understood the poem by a stirring of the imagination,
by something like an enjoyment of it from which you afterwards
revolt in your own mind. It is more self-centred, therefore, and
so less reliable, to write about the poems you have thought bad
than about the poems you have thought good.
 
But, before I start to do this, I must consider two fundamental
objections to my purpose, which many critics would raise; the
objection that the meaning of poetry does not matter, because it
is apprehended as Pure Sound, and the objection that what really
matters about poetry is the Atmosphere. These* two opinions
are very similar, but are best answered in different ways.
 
The main argument for Pure Sound is the extreme oddity ^>f
the way poetry acts ; the way lines seem beautiful without reason ;
the way you can decide (or at any rate people in practice do
decide) whether a poem deserves further attention by a mere
glance at the way it uses its words. This certainly is an import-
ant piece of evidence, and makes one feel that very strange things
may be true about the mode of action of poetry, but it shows very
little as to what these things may be. I shall myself try to bully
my readers into a belief in the importance of ambiguity, for just
this same reason.
 
There was a period of the cult of Pure Sound when infants
were read passages from Homer, and then questioned as to their
impressions, not unlike Darwin playing the trombone to his
French beans. And, indeed, conclusive evidence was collected
in this way that a vague impression as to the subject of a poem
may be derived from a study of its reciter ; one can only question
how far this is relevant to the question at issue. There is a crux
here (to revive a rather stale controversy) which makes experi-
ment difficult; on the one hand, it is no use telling a person who
does not know Greek to read Homer for himself, because he does
not know how to pronounce it (even if he knows how to pro-
nounce the words, he will not pronounce them as a sentence) ; on
the other hand, if you tell him how to pronounce the sentence, it
is impossible to be sure you have not told him how to feel about
it by the tone of your voice. Certainly it is no useoanying that
feelings can be conveyed, even between animSls of different
species, by grunts and screams; and there are those who say that
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 9
 
language itself was at first a self-explanatory symbolism, based on
these expressions of feeling, on onomatopoeia, and on that use of
the tongue to point at matters of interest, or to imitate and so
define a difficult action, which may be seen in a child learning to
write. Certainly, too, one would expect language in poetry to
retain its primitive uses more than elsewhere. But this sort of
thing is no use to the admirers of Pure Sound in poetry, because
a grunt is at once too crude and too subtle to be conveyed by the
alphabet at all. Any word can be either screamed or grunted, so
if you have merely a word written on paper you have to know not
only its meaning but something about its context before it can
tell you whether to grunt or to scream. Most admirers of Pure
Sound, indeed, will admit that you have to be experienced in the
words used by a poet before their sound can be appreciated, and
evidently this admission makes all the difference.
 
They are the more willing to admit this because they are
usually appreciative critics, persons of an extreme delicacy of
sensibility who have to guard this delicacy in unusual ways. A
first-rate wine-taster may only taste small amounts of wine, for
fear of disturbing his palate, and I dare say it would really be
unwise for an appreciative critic to use his intelligence too freely ;
but there is no reason why these specialised habits should be
imposed on the ordinary drinker or reader. Specialists usually
have a strong Trades Union sense, and critics have been perhaps
too willing to insist that the operation of poetry is something
magical, to which only their own method of incantation can be
applied, or like the growth of a flower, which it would be folly
to allow analysis to destroy by digging the roots up and crushing
out the juices into the light of day. Critics, as ' barking dogs/ on
this view, are of two sorts : those who merely relieve themselves
against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who after-
wards scratch it up. I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second
of these classes ; unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me,
a sense that this would be a good place to scratch; the reasons
that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are like
the reasons for anything else; one can reason about them; and
while it nay be true that the roots of beauty ought not to be
violated, it see A ns to me very arrogant of the appreciative critic to
think that he could do this, if he chose, by a little scratching.
 
 
 
io SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
One reason, by the way, that the belief in Pure Sound is plaus-
ible seems interesting; it is that people often test it by experi-
ments within their own family of languages. They know, say, a
novel-reading amount of French, a public-school amount of
Latin, half- forgotten, and a smattering of Italian ; they try read-
ing the Oxford Book of Spanish Verse, and are impressed by the
discovery that they can get a great deal of pleasure out of in-
dividual lines without understanding the 'meaning* at all. Now
such poetry is in a tradition to which they are accustomed ; they
know roughly what to look for in the poetry of a Latin language ;
they know what the syntax connecting one or two large words is
likely to be ; and they are almost sure to know the root meaning
(though not the precise meaning) of the one or two large word&
It seems to be true that with this equipment one has a very fair
chance of seeing what I may call the ' lyrical point ' of one or two
lines. This may be an important piece of evidence about the
mode of action of poetry, but as far as it concerns Pure Sound one
must remember that such people will be pronouncing the lines
entirely wrong. (And Vergil remains the most melodious of
poets through all the vagaries of official pronunciation.)
 
Such points would be admitted by most reasonable people, and
it may seem an evasion on my part to attack Pure Sound as a
defence of the opposite fallacy of Pure Meaning. But the situa-
tion about Pure Sound is like that about crude materialism ; both
beliefs lead a sort of underground existence, and at a low level of
organisation have much vitality. Crude materialism is the first
rough idea that people tumble into when they are interested in
the sciences. In the same way, if you ask people in general about
the interpretation of poetry, they are likely to say that it is no
use talking because what they like is the sheer beauty of the
sound.
 
The official, and correct, view, I take it, is that * the sound must
be an echo to the sense/ that we do not know what this condition
may be, but that if we knew a great deal it could be analysed in
detail. Thus
 
 
 
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris
 
(Aedkid, vi.)
 
(the stock line to try on the dog) is beautiful because ulterioris^
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY H
 
the word of their banishment, is long, and so shows that they
have been waiting a long time; and because the repeated vowel-
sound (itself the moan of hopeless sorrow) in oris amore connects
the two words as if of their own natures, and makes desire belong
necessarily to the unattainable. This I think quite true, but it is
no use deducing from it Tennyson's simple and laborious cult of
onomatopoeia. Once you abandon the idea that sounds are valu-
able in themselves you are thrown far towards the other extreme ;
you must say that the sounds are valuable because they suggest
incidental connections of meaning. If this be true, one can do a
great deal to make poetry intelligible by discussing the variety of
resultant meanings, without committing oneself very deeply as to
ho*v they have been suggested by the sounds.
 
In claiming so much for analysis I shall seem to be aligning
myself with the 'scientific' mode of literary criticism, with
'psychological' explanations of everything, and columns of a
reader's sensitivity-coefficients. There is coming into existence
a sort of party-system among critics; those critics will soon be
considered mere shufflers who are not either only interested in
Truth or only interested in Beauty; and Goodness, the third
member of that indissoluble trinity, has somehow got attached
only to Truth, so that aesthetes are expected to profess a playful
indifference to the principles on which they in fact (one is to
assume) order their own lives. It is odd, and I think harmful,
that this fin-de-stecle squabble is still going on. Somewhere in
the eighties of the last century the idea got about that Physics,
and those sciences that might be conceived as derivatives of
Physics, held a monopoly of Reason ; aesthetes had therefore to
eschew Reason. Now there are serious difficulties about apply-
ing the scientific view of truth to the arts; I shall attempt to
restate them in my last chapter. But the belief that Reason can
be applied to the arts is as old as criticism, and fundamental to it;
there is no more materialism about it than there is about Aris-
totle. And if one is to be forced to take sides, as a matter of mere
personal venom, I must confess I find the crudity and latent
fallacy of a psychologist discussing verses that he does not enjoy
less disagi^able than the blurred and tasteless refusal to make
statements of an aesthete who conceives himself to be only inter-
ested in Taste,
 
 
 
12 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Johnson's reiparks about the correspondence theory are not to
be despised, particularly in the g2nd Rambler: '
 
There is nothing in the art of versifying so much exposed to the
power of imagination as the accommodation of the sound to the
sense. It is scarcely to be doubted that on many occasions we make
the music that we imagine ourselves to hear, that we modulate the
poem by our own disposition, and ascribe to the numbers the effects
of the sense.
 
But on the other hand :
 
The measure of time in pronouncing may be varied so as very
strongly to represent, not only the modes of external motion, but the
quick or slow succession of ideas, and consequently the passions of
the mind.
 
His examples certainly show very clearly that there is no single
mode of correspondence ; that very similar devices of sound may
correspond effectively to very different meanings. And often
enough in Milton, for instance, it is the opposite of onomatopoeia
which is employed ; thus in the lines about Vulcan
 
thrown by angry Jove
 
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements; from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day ; and with the setting sun
Dropped from the zenith
 
Milton is extremely cool about the matter; one is made to sit
with him pleasantly in the shade, all day long, needing no further
satisfaction; it is delightfully soothing to feel that the devil is all
the time falling faster and faster. But this is only to say that a
sound effect must be interpreted. I think myself its most im-
portant mode of action is to connect two words by similarity of
sound so that you are made to think of their possible connections.
Another of Johnson's remarks brings up some questions which
deserve mention :
 
Dionysius himself tells us, that the sound of Homer's verses
sometimes exhibits the idea of corporal bulk : is not this a discovery
nearly approaching to that of the blind man, who, after long enquiry
into the nature of the scarlet colour, found that it represented
nothing so much as the clangour of a trumpet ?
 
The blind man seems to have anticipated Miss SitweM, who has
 
actually used this comparison, I think very justly. *She also writes
 
The light is braying like an ass,
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 13
 
which of course depends for its effect on the \7hole scene de-
scribed. In such cases, apprehension in terms of 6ne of the
senses is described in terms of, or compared with, one of the
others; this has been called synaesthesia, and is clearly some-
times effective. It throws back the reader upon the undiffer-
entiated affective states which are all that such sensations have in
common; perhaps recalls him to an infantile state before they
had been distinguished from one another; and may actually
induce a sort of rudimentary disorder into his modes of sensation
(so that the ' images ' of the visualiser are transformed sounds)
like those due to migraine or epilepsy or drugs like mescal.
Mescal-eaters have just that impression common among readers
of * pure ' poetry, that they are seeing very delightful but quite
new colours, or knowing something which would be very im-
portant and interesting if they could make out just what it was.
But how such a disturbance can be of serious importance to a
reader of poetry it is not easy to see ; or how one is to be sure
when it is occurring. Often it is no more than a device for in-
sisting on ambiguities of the first type ; the main comparison is
neither true nor false, and one is thrown back on a series of
possible associations, as to the social setting in which these sensa-
tions would be expected, or the mood in which they would be
sought out. Miss Sitwell seemed often to use the device rather
as a flag of defiance, to insist that the main meaning is not what
she valued, and the reader must put himself into a poetic or re-
ceptive frame of mind. (' These two things are alike in that, for
quite different reasons, they harmonise with my mood/) But in
a way this is only to push the notion of correspondence further
back; how do these sensations come to seem proper to their
social setting or their mood? Poe often seems excited about
colours in a way that reminds one of people's reports from mescal,
but then it is a Mexican drug and he had probably tried it; one
cannot deduce anything very profound about poetry from that.
And Swinburne often uses devices that seem to demand syn-
aesthesia;
 
TLy voice is an odour that fades in a flame,
 
and suchlike ; but that is only part of his diffused use of grammar,
by which several precise conceits can be dissolved into a vague-
 
 
 
14 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
ness; it would* probably be a misreading here to confuse the
modes of sensation. Nor, so far as I can see, is his use of the
device at all similar to that made of it by Miss Sitwell.
 
Of course, when a poet is describing paintings, as Spenser does
so often, the colours mentioned are supposed to act on one as
they would do in a painting. Now, it is naturally harder to
analyse the visual arts than poetry, because their modes of satis-
faction are further removed from the verbal system on which the
discursive intelligence usually supports itself. In any case, I am
not competent to do such a thing and shall not attempt it here ;
I mention this mysterious matter as a way in which poetry might
be taking effect, but which I shall assume I can ignore. And it
seems worth uttering the pious hope that such effects do not really
depend on an obscure physiological perversion, which could be
exploited separately, so as to * deceive ' ; but that there is a field
for analysis in the way the paintings admired by a particular school
of poets are assumed as elements of sensibility, and referred to
covertly, in their poetry.
 
So the discovery of the blind man may have its importance, but
we must now turn to what Dionysius himself said, which may be
very important indeed. I mentioned a moment ago the theory
that language is fundamentally a system of gestures with the
tongue ; there is no doubt that, once the advocate of Pure Sound
has admitted that sound has some connection with meaning, Sir
Richard Paget's method of interpretation gives him a great deal
of rational support. Every one feels that, quite apart from words
like 'pop/ which are like their meaning, there are words like
'wee/ which are fitted to their meaning; the Paget theory would
explain this (taking only the vowel, for this brief example) by
saying that while 'huge' moves the tongue back from the teeth
so as to make as large a space as it can, 'wee' moves the tongue
near to the teeth so as to leave as small a space as it can. In this
way, not the sound itself, but our experience of the way it is pro-
duced, does, in fact, continually exhibit the idea of corporal bulk,
which is just what Johnson thought impossible. All the sounds
may be reduced to gestures in this way, more or4*es fancifully;
they all, then, carry some suggestion of size, or^hape, or move-
ment, or pressure, up, down, forward, or backward, and, in
themselves, that is all they can convey. This theory would have
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 15
 
a peculiar charm for the materialists who wanted to explain every-
thing in terms of Euclid and Newton ; it offers a sort of guarantee
that the explanation will be a picture on the blackboard. It is
rather bad luck that it should be developed so late, when the
faith even of physicists in pictures on the blackboard is not what
it was, but that it explains some part of the effect of language it
would be hard to deny.
 
Evidently there is here another field for the future analysis of
poetry; when it becomes possible to list the root notions that the
words must by their own nature be suggesting, it will be possible
and profitable to discuss in some detail how far their sound is an
echo to their sense. But such a process will always be subject to
curious limitations ;
 
. . . owing to the comparative paucity of different mouth-gestures,
each mouth-gesture which produces its own particular sound or
root word has to stand for a considerable number of hand- (or
other bodily) gestures ; to put it in another way, each root word is
naturally liable to bear many different meanings. . . . One other
point may be noted; the same mouth-gesture may be naturally
construed in several different ways. Thus, the movement of
tongue or lips may represent a pantomimic movement, symbolising
a real movement, or a spatial relation of some kind, e.g. above,
below, around, or it may represent a shape of some kind drawn in
outline. Finally, any of these meanings may be used figuratively
instead of concretely.
 
(Sir RICHARD PAGET, Human Speech.)
 
Apart, then, from the ambiguities in the fully-developed lan-
guage, such as I propose to consider, one would have also to
consider the ambiguities (of the same sort, but entirely different
in their details) which are always latent in the fundamental
symbolism of the sound.
 
This suggests that the process of analysing the effect of a poem,
not indeed completely, but sufficiently to be any use, must be
one of altogether impossible complexity; that one must instead
give up all hope of doing such a thing, and fall back on a doctrin-
aire irrationalism. It is true that no explanation can be adequate,
but, on the o+her hand, any one valid reason that can be found is
worth giving; the more one understands one's own reactions
the less one is at their mercy.
 
Thus it seems to be fairly true, as a matter of introspection,
 
 
 
16 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
that one judges lhe quality of a poem by something felt as ' sound'
and something felt as * rhythm/ but there are no necessary deduc-
tions from this fact, and it is liable to be misleading. One might
use a spatial metaphor and a tautology to make it seem less
important ; ' the sound of words' does not enter that part of the
mind where it is effective, except in so far as the words take effect
as words.' What this * taking effect' may be like I shall try to
discuss in my last chapter.
 
It has been deduced from the belief in Pure Sound that the
resultant meaning of the w6rds need not be known, that it is
enough to know the meaning of the words in isolation and enough
of their syntax to read them aloud rightly. In a degree this is
often true, but it is better to regard this state of limited knowledge
as a complicated state of indecision which involves much estimat-
ing of probabilities, and is less ignorance than an ordered suspen-
sion of judgment. Secondly, and more seriously, it has been
deduced from this belief that you are liable to destroy the poem
if its meaning is discovered, that it is important to preserve one's
innocence about the meaning of verses, that one must use sensi-
bility, and as little intelligence as possible. This, also, is often
true, but I take a moral line here, and say it is true only of bad
poetry. People suspect analysis, often rightly, as the refuge of
the emotionally sterile, but that is only to say that analysis is often
done badly. In so far as such a destruction occurs because you
have used your intelligence it must be accepted, and you may
reasonably expect to become interested in another poem, so that
the loss is not permanent, because that is the normal process of
learning to appreciate poetry.
 
As for the belief in Atmosphere, about which I shall now make
some inadequate remarks, it may be viewed as a third deduction
from the belief in Pure Sound. Critics often say or imply casu-
ally that some poetic effect conveys a direct * physical' quality,
something mysteriously intimate, something which it is strange a
poet could convey, something like a sensation which is not
attached to any one of the senses. This may only be a statement
of how they themselves applied their conscious attention when
reading the poem ; thus a musical chord is a direct sei?sation, but
not therefore unanalysable into its separate notes even at the
moment of sensing. It can be either felt or thought; the two
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 17
 
things are similar but different; and it require? practice to do
both at once. Or the statement might, one cannot deny, mean
that there has been some confusion of the senses. But it may
mean something more important, involving a distinction between
' sensation ' and * feeling ' ; that what the poet has conveyed is no
assembly of grammatical meanings, capable of analysis, but a
'mood/ an 'atmosphere/ a 'personality/ an attitude to life, an
undifferentiated mode of being.
 
Probably it is in this way, as a sort of taste in the head, that
one remembers one's own past experiences, including the experi-
ence of reading a particular poet. Probably, again, this mode of
apprehension is connected with the condition of the whole body,
and is as near as one can get to an immediate self-knowledge.
You may say, then, that any grammatical analysis of poetry, since
it must ignore atmosphere, is trivial; that atmosphere is con-
veyed in some unknown and fundamental way as a by-product of
meaning ; that analysis cannot hope to do anything but ignore it ;
and that criticism can only state that it is there.
 
This belief may in part explain the badness of much nine-
teenth-century poetry, and how it came to be written by critically
sensitive people. They admired the poetry of previous genera-
tions, very rightly, for the taste it left in the head, and, failing to
realise that the process of putting such a taste into a reader's head
involves a great deal of work which does not feel like a taste in
the head while it is being done, attempting, therefore, to conceive
a taste in the head and put it straight on to their paper, they pro-
duced tastes in the head which were in fact blurred, complacent,
and unpleasing. But to say that the consequences of a critical
formula have been unfortunate is not to say that it is untrue or
even unusable; it is very necessary for a critic to remember
about the atmosphere, chiefly because he must concentrate on the
whole of the poem he is talking about rather than on the par-
ticular things that he can find to say.
 
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. J* may not be valid everywhere ; though it be valid
everywhere it may not explain everything; but in so far as he is
to do any work he must assume it is valid where he is working,
and will explain what he is trying to explain. I assume, therefore,
B
 
 
 
18 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
that the ' atmosphere * is the consciousness of what is implied by
the meaning, and I believe that this assumption is profitable in
many more cases than one would suppose.
 
I shall try to recommend this opinion by giving what seems to
me a striking example; a case, that is, where an affective state
is conveyed particularly vividly by devices of particular irrelev-
ance. Macbeth, in these famous lines, may easily seem to be
doing something physiological and odd, something outside the
normal use of words. It is when he is spurring on his jaded
hatred to the murder of Banquo and Fleance.
 
Come, seeling Night,
Skarfe up the tender Eye of pitiful Day
And with thy bloddie and invisible Hand
Cancel and teare to pieces that great Bond
That keepes me pale.
 
Light thickens, and the Crow
Makes Wing to th* Rookie Wood.
Good things of Day begin to droope, and drowse,
While Night's black Agents to their Prey's doe rowse.
Thou marvell'st at my words, but hold thee still;
Things bad begun, make strong themselves by ill:
So prythee go with me.
 
(in. ii. 50.)
 
The condition of his skin (By the pricking of my thumbs Some-
thing wicked this way comes), the sense of being withdrawn far
within his own flesh (like an old lecher, a small fire at his heart,
all the rest on's body cold), the sense that the affair is prosaic, it
need not be mentioned, and yet an occasional squawking of the
nerves (Hobbididance croaks in Tom's belly), in short the whole
frame of body, as I read the lines, is lit up and imposed upon the
reader, from which Macbeth lashes his exhausted energies into a
new, into the accustomed, readiness for murder.
 
I have tried by these almost irrelevant quotations to show
much work the reader of Shakespeare is prepared to do for him,
how one is helped by the rest of his work to put a great deal into
any part of it, but this seems to explain very little. Various
similar sound effects or associations may be noted; there is a
suggestion of witches' broth, or curdling blood, abotat thickens,
which the vowel sound of light, coming next to it, with the move-
ment of stirring treacle, and the cluck of the k-sounds, intensify;
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 19
 
a suggestion, too, of harsh, limpid echo, and, under careful feet
of poachers, an abrupt crackling of sticks. The vowel sounds at
the end make an increasing darkness as the crow goes forward.
But, after all, one would be very surprised if two people got the
same result from putting a sound-effect into words in this way.
 
It is safer to point out that rooks were, in any case, creatures of
foreboding :
 
Augurs, and understood Relations, have
 
By Magot-Pyes, and Choughes, and Rookes, brought forth
 
The secret *st man of Blood ;
 
(in. iv. 125.)
 
that Macbeth looked out of the window because Banquo was to
be killed soon after dusk, so he wanted to know how the tim6 was
going; and that a dramatic situation is always heightened by
breaking off the dialogue to look out of the window, especially if
some kind of Pathetic Fallacy is to be observed outside. But to
notice this particular pathetic fallacy you must withdraw yourself
from the apprehension of its effect, and be ready to notice irrelev-
ant points which may act as a clue. I believe it is that the peaceful
solitary crow, moving towards bed and the other crows, is made
unnaturally like Macbeth and a murderer who is coming against
them; this is suggested by the next lines, which do not say
whether the crow is one of the good things of day or one of night's
black agents (it is, at any rate, black), by the eerie way that light
itself is thickening, as a man turns against men, a crow against
crows, perhaps by the portentous way a crow's voice will carry at
such a time, and by the sharpness of its wings against the even
glow of a sky after sundown ; but mainly, I think, by the use of
the two words rook and crow.
 
Rooks live in a crowd and are mainly vegetarian; crow may be
either another name for a rook, especially when seen alone, or it
may mean the solitary Carrion crow. This subdued pun is made
to imply here that Macbeth, looking out of the window, is trying
to see himself as a murderer, and can only see himself as in the
position of the crow, that his day of power, now, is closing; that
he has to distinguish himself from the other rooks by a difference
of name, rook-crow, like the kingly title, only; that he is anxious,
at bottom, to be at one with the other rooks, not to murder them;
that he can no longer, or that he may yet, be united with the
 
 
 
20 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
rookery; and that he is murdering Banquo in a forlorn attempt
 
to obtain peace of mind. 1
 
Interest in ' atmospheres' is a critical attitude designed for, and
particularly suited to, the poets of the nineteenth century; this
may tell us something about them, and in part explain why they
are so little ambiguous in the sense with which I am concerned.
For a variety of reasons, they found themselves living in an
intellectual framework with which it was very difficult to write
poetry, in which poetry was rather improper, or was irrelevant
to business, especially the business of becoming Fit to Survive,
or was an indulgence of one's lower nature in beliefs the scientists
knew were untrue. On the other hand, they had a large public
which was as anxious to escape from this intellectual frameworK,
on holiday, as they were themselves. Almost all of them, there-
fore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood,
where they were able to conceive things poetically, and whatever
they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited
and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical
inspiration. Mr. Harold Nicolson has written excellently about
Swinburne's fixation on to the excitements of his early reading
and experience, and about the unique position in the life of
Tennyson occupied by the moaning of cold wind round a child
frightened for its identity upon the fens. Wordsworth frankly
had no inspiration other than his use, when a boy, of the moun-
tains as a totem or father-substitute, and Byron only at the end
of his life, in the first cantos of Don Juan in particular, escaped
from the infantile incest-fixation upon his sister which was till
then all that he had got to say. As for Keats's desire for death
and his mother, it has become a byword among the learned.
Shelley, perhaps, does not strike one as keeping so sharp a dis-
tinction between the world he considered real and the world
from which he wrote poetry, but this did not in his case improve
either of them; while Browning and Meredith, who did write
from the world they lived in, affect me as novel-writers of merit
with no lyrical inspiration at all. Coleridge, it is true, relied on
 
1 It was stupid of me to present this example as a sort of t^st case, with
a tidy solution drawn from the names of birds. Obviously the passage is
still impressive if you have no opinions at all about the difference between
crows and rooks. But it is at least a good example of a heavy Atmosphere,
and I don't think my treatment of it was wrong as far as it went.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 21
 
opium rather than the nursery. But of all these men an imposed
excitement, a sense of uncaused warmth, achievement, gratifica-
tion, a sense of hugging to oneself a private dream-world, is the
main interest and material. 1
 
In that age, too, began the doubt as to whether this man or that
was 'grown-up,' which has ever since occupied so deeply the
minds of those interested in their friends. Macaulay complains
somewhere that in his day a man was sure to be accused of a child-
mind if no doubt could be cast ' either on the ability of his in-
telligence or the innocence of his character' ; now nobody seems
to have said this in the eighteenth century. Before the Romantic
Revival the possibilities of not growing up had never been
exploited so far as to become a subject for popular anxiety.
 
Of course, these pat little theories are ridiculously simple;
fantasy gratifications and a protective attitude towards one's inner
life are in some degree essential for the production of poetry, and
I have no wish to pretend the Romantics were not great poets.
But I think this will be admitted, that they were making a use of
language very different from that of their predecessors ; imagine
Shakespeare or Pope keeping a tap-root in this way. One might
expect, then, that they would not need to use ambiguities of the
kind I shall consider to give vivacity to their language, or even
ambiguities with which the student of language, as such, is con-
cerned ; that the mode of approach to them should be psycho-
logical rather than grammatical, and that their distortions of
meaning will belong to darker regions of the mind.
 
This introduction has grown too long and too portentous ; it
is time I settled down to the little I can do in this chapter, which
is to list a few examples of ambiguity of the first type. Many of
the preceding paragraphs are designed merely for defence ; if it is
said that the verbal analyst is a crude irrelevant fellow who should
be thinking about the atmosphere, the reply is that though there
may be an atmosphere to which analysis is irrelevant, it is not
necessarily anything very respectable.
 
I have already considered the comparison of two things which
does not say in virtue of what they are to be compared. Of the
 
1 Byron I understand did not meet his half-sister at all till he was grown
up. It seems no good trying to improve this paragraph, and I still think that
the last sentence summing it up is sufficiently true.
 
 
 
22 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
same sort, though less common, is the ornamental use of false
antithesis, which places words as if in opposition to one another
without saying in virtue of what they are to be opposed. Cases
in which several ways of opposing them are implied will be found
in my later chapters as examples of more advanced ambiguity;
but the device may be used to deny such an antithesis altogether.
There is a rather trivial example of this in Peacock's War Song :
 
We there, in strife bewildring,
 
Spilt blood enough to swim in ;
We orphaned many children
 
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
 
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
 
The spearmen and the bowmen.
 
In the last two lines he is not concerned to be thinking, to decide
something or convince somebody ; he makes a cradle and rocks
himself in it ; it is the tone of a man imagining himself in a mood
wholly alien to him, and looking round with an amused com-
placent absence of reflection. The lines also give finality in that
the impulse is shown to be dying away; some reflection has been
implied on the difference between heroes and cravens, on their
equal deaths, and on the relations between eagles and heroes,
ravens and cravens, but the irrelevant calm of the last line says
' these distinctions may be made at other times, but they are
irrelevant to our slaughter and the reaction to it of Nature,' he
proceeds to another merely technical way of separating the dead
into classes, and by the failure of the antithesis shows he is merely
thinking of them as a huge pile.
 
How loved, how honoured once, avails thee not,
 
To whom related, or by whom begot;
 
A heap of dust is all remains of thee ;
 
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.
 
(POPE, Unfortunate Lady.)
 
The two parts of the second line make a claim to be alternatives
which is not obviously justified, and this I think implies a good
deal. If the antithesis is to be serious, or must me?n * one of her
relations was grand but her father was humble,' or the other way
about; thus one would take how to mean 'whether much or
little 1 (it could mean 'though you were so greatly*), and the last
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 23
 
line to contrast her with the proud, so as to imply that she is
humble (it could unite her with the proud, and deduce the death
of all of them from the death of one). This obscurity is part of
the * Gothic ' atmosphere that Pope wanted : ' her birth was high,
but there was a mysterious stain on it ' ; or ' though you jnight not
think it, her birth was high'; or 'her birth was high, but not
higher than births to which I am accustomed/ Here, however,
the false antithesis is finding another use, to convey the attitude
of Pope to the subject. 'How simple, how irrelevant to the
merits of the unfortunate lady, are such relationships; everybody
has had both a relation and a father; how little I can admire the
arrogance of great families on this point; how little, too, the
snobbery of my reader, who is unlikely to belong to a great
family; to how many people this subject would be extremely
fruitful of antitheses ; how little fruitful of antitheses it seems to
an independent soul like mine/ What is important about such
devices is that they leave it to the reader vaguely to invent some-
thing, and make him leave it at the back of his mind.
 
Not unlike the use of a comparison which does not say in virtue
of what the two things are to be compared is the use of a com-
parative adjective which does not say what its noun is to be com-
pared with; since all adjectives are in a sense comparative, this
source of ambiguity is a sufficiently general one. In particular,
it is the chief source of euphuistic conceits and the paradoxes
cultivated in the 'nineties, which give a noun two contradictory
adjectives and leave it to the reader to see how the adjectives
are used. 1 Examples of this sort are too well known, and are
generally thought too trivial, to be worth quoting. I shall give an
example from one of Mr. Waley's Chinese translations, to insist
upon the profundity of feeling which such a device may enshrine.
 
Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
 
Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.
 
The human mind has two main scales on which to measure time.
The large one takes the length of a human life as its unit, so that
 
1 Such a trick has usually one meaning which is the answer of the puzzle,
but while you are puzzling the words have possible alternative meanings,
and even to those who see the answers at once the alternatives are in a way
present as being denied. They may appear as the views of commonplace
people, who are thereby snubbed ; but they can also make a real ambiguity
when the denial is not felt to be complete.
 
 
 
24 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
there is nothing to be done about life, it is of an animal dignity
and simplicity, and must be regarded from a peaceable and fatal-
istic point of view. The small one takes as its unit the conscious
moment, and it is from this that you consider the neighbouring
space, an activity of the will, delicacies of social tone, and your
personality. The scales are so far apart as almost to give the
effect of defining two dimensions ; they do not come into contact
because what is too large to be conceived by the one is still too
small to be conceived by the other. Thus, taking the units as a
century and the quarter of a second, their ratio is ten to the tenth
and their mean is the standard working day ; or taking the smaller
one as five minutes, their mean is the whole of summer. The
repose and self-command given by the use of the first are cdh-
trasted with the speed at which it shows the years to be passing
from you, and therefore with the fear of death; the fever and
multiplicity of life, as known by the use of the second, are
contrasted with the calm of the external space of which it gives
consciousness, with the absolute or extra-temporal value attached
to the brief moments of self-knowledge with which it is concerned,
and with a sense of security in that it makes death so far off.
 
Both these time-scales and their contrasts are included by these
two lines in a single act of apprehension, because of the words
swift and still. Being contradictory as they stand, they demand
to be conceived in different ways ; we are enabled, therefore, to
meet the open skies with an answering stability of self-knowledge ;
to meet the brevity of human life with an ironical sense that it is
morning and springtime, that there is a whole summer before
winter, a whole day before night.
 
I call swift and still here ambiguous, though each is meant to
be referred to one particular time-scale, because between them
they put two time-scales into the reader's mind in a single act of
apprehension. But these scales, being both present, are in some
degree used for each adjective, so that the words are ambiguous
in a more direct sense ; the years of a man's life seem swift even
on the small scale, like the mist from the mountains which
' gathers a moment, then scatters ' ; the morning seems still even
on the large scale, so that this moment is apocalyptic and a type
of heaven.
 
Lacking rhyme, metre, and any overt device such as compari-
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 25
 
son, these lines are what we should normally ca 1 ! poetry only by
virtue of their compactness ; two statements are made as if they
were connected, and the reader is forced to consider their rela-
tions for himself. The reason why these facts should have been
selected for a poem is left for him to invent; he will invent a
variety of reasons and order them in his own mind. This, I
think, is the essential fact about the poetical use of language.
 
Among metaphors effective from several points of view one
may include, by no great extension, those metaphors which are
partly recognised as such and partly received simply as words in
their acquired sense. All languages are composed of dead meta-
phors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full
01 metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and,
while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied com-
parison. The school rule against mixed metaphor, which in
itself is so powerful a weapon, is largely necessary because of the
presence of these sleepers, who must be treated with respect;
they are harder to use than either plain word or metaphor
because if you mix them you must show you are conscious of
their meaning, and are not merely being insensitive to the possi-
bilities of the language.
 
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour.
Brightness falls from the air.
Queens have died young and fair.
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
 
Lord, have mercy upon us.
 
(NASH, Summer's Last Will and Testament.)
 
I call it a subdued metaphor here that devour should mean
'remove* or 'replace,' with no more than an overtone of cruelty
and the unnatural. This may seem very different from the less
evident subdued metaphor in the derivation of a word like
'apprehension,' say, but a reader may ignore the consequences
even of so evident a metaphor as devour. If you go into the
metaphor it may make Time the edax rerum, and wrinkles only
time's tooth-marks; more probably it compares long curving
wrinkles on the face to rodent ulcers, caterpillars on petals, and
the worms that are to gnaw it in the grave. Of these, the cater-
 
 
 
26 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
pillar (from flower) are what the comparison insists upon, but the
Elizabethan imagination would let slip no chance of airing its
miraculous corpse- worm.
On the other hand
 
Brightness falls from the air
 
is an example of ambiguity by vagueness, such as was used to
excess by the Pre-Raphaelites. Evidently there are a variety of
things the line may be about. The sun and moon pass under the
earth after their period of shining, and there are stars falling at
odd times ; Icarus and the prey of hawks, having soared upwards
towards heaven, fall exhausted or dead; the glittering turning
things the sixteenth century put on the top of a building mky
have fallen too often. In another sense, hawks, lightning, and
meteorites fall flashing from heaven upon their prey. Taking
brightness as abstract, not as meaning something bright, it is as a
benefit that light falls, diffusely reflected, from the sky. In so
far as the sky is brighter than the earth (especially at twilight),
brightness is natural to it; in so far as the earth may be bright
when the clouds are dark, brightness falls from the sky to the earth
when there is a threat of thunder. 'All is unsafe, even the
heavens are not sure of their brightness,' or 'the qualities in man
that deserve respect are not natural to him but brief gifts from
God; they fall like manna, and melt as soon.' One may extract,
too, from the oppression in the notion of thunder the idea that
now, 'in time of pestilence/ the generosity of Nature is mysteri-
ously interrupted; even at the scene of brilliant ecclesiastical
festivity for which the poem was written there is a taint of dark-
ness in the very air.
 
It is proper to mention a rather cynical theory that Nash wrote
or meant 'hair'; still, though less imaginative, this is very
adequate; oddly enough (it is electricity and the mysterious
vitality of youth which have fallen from the hair) carries much the
same suggestion as the other version; and gives the relief of a
single direct meaning. Elizabethan pronunciation was very little
troubled by snobbery, and it is conceivable that Nash meant both
words to take effect in some way. Now that all this fuss has been
made about aitches it is impossible to imagine what such a line
would sound like.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 27
 
For a final meaning of this line one must consider the line
which follows it; there is another case of poetry by juxtaposition.
In
 
Dust hath closed Helen's eye
 
one must think of Helen in part as an undecaying corpse or a
statue ; it is dust from outside which settles on her eyelids, and
shows that it is long since they have been opened; only in the
background, as a truth which could not otherwise be faced, is it
suggesced that the dust is generated from her own corruption.
As a result of this ambiguity, the line imposes on brightness a
further and more terrible comparison ; on the one hand, it is the
bright motes dancing in sunbeams, which fall and become dust
which is dirty and infectious ; on the other, the lightness, gaiety,
and activity of humanity, which shall come to dust in the grave.
When a word is selected, as a * vivid detail,' as particular for
general, a reader may suspect alternative reasons why it has been
selected; indeed the author might find it hard to say. When
there are several such words there may be alternative ways of
viewing them in order of importance.
 
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.
 
(BEN JONSON, Pan's Anniversary.)
 
Alas, the word explaining which of the items in this list we are to
take most seriously, belongs to the sheep by proximity and the
break in the line, to the grass by rhyming with it, and to the
shepherds, humble though they may be, by the processes of human
judgment; so that all three are given due attention, and the
balance of the verse is maintained. The Biblical suggestions of
grass as symbolic of the life of man (* in the mornings it is green
and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and
withered') add to the solemnity; or from another point of view
make the passage absurdly blasphemous, because Pan here is
James I. The grace, the pathos, the 'sheer song' of the couplet
is given by an enforced subtlety of intonation, from the difficulty
of saying It so as to bring out all the implications.
 
This last consideration is important, because it gives some hint
as to why these devices belong to poetry rather than to prose, or
 
 
 
28 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
indeed why poetry seems different from prose. A metrical
scheme imposes a sort of intensity of interpretation upon the
grammar, which makes it fruitful even when there is no 'song.'
 
I want to know a butcher paints,
 
A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
 
Candlestick-maker, much acquaints
 
His soul with song, or, haply mute,
 
Blows out his brains upon the flute. (BROWNING.)
 
' I want to know that the whole class of butchers paints,' or ' I
want to know that some one butcher paints,' or ' I want to know
personally a butcher who paints'; any of these may be taken as
the meaning, and their resultant is something like, 'I want to
know that a member of the class of butchers is moderately likely
to be a man who paints, or at any rate that he can do so if he
wishes.' The demands of metre allow the poet to say something
which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks
of the various colloquial forms which are near to it, and puts
them together; weighting their probabilities in proportion to
their nearness. It is for such reasons as this that poetry can be
more compact, while seeming to be less precise, than prose.
 
It is for these reasons, too, among others, that an insensitivity
in a poet to the contemporary style of speaking, into which he has
been trained to concentrate his powers of apprehension, is so
disastrous, can be noticed so quickly, and produces that curious
thinness or blurring of texture one finds in William Morris. And
that is why the practice of putting single words into italics for
emphasis (again the Victorians are guilty) is so vulgar; a well-
constructed sentence should be able to carry a stress on any of its
words and should show in itself how these stresses are to be
compounded. Both in prose and poetry, it is the impression that
implications of this sort have been handled with more judgment
than you yourself realise, that with this language as text innumer-
able further meanings, which you do not know, could be deduced,
that forces you to feel respect for a style.
 
Also I have considered the ' implications ' of sentences so far
mainly as what they take for granted, as what must already be in
mind if they are to be suitable. The stock example of this is,
'Have you stopped beating your wife?', which claims to know
already that it has been your habit to do so. A complementary
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 29
 
sort of implication may be defined : what must not be in mind if
the sentence is to be suitable, what it leaves vague, or is not
thinking about, or does not feel. The negative here assumes you
might expect this particular thing to be in mind, because other-
wise you would not have thought of it as an implication. You
might think it lessened the importance of a negative implication
that one is only conscious of it if its assumption is unjustified ;
but the mind is a destroyer ; any assumption may chance to be
questioned ; and most people are conscious that they, therefore,
can to some extent impose what they assume. In speaking of
 
* implications' one thinks as much of negative as of positive ones,
indeed it would often be difficult to make the distinction. One
would notice, to discover a negative implication, the degree to
which stock phrases were used which did not fit the situation very
closely, as if it did not need to be, or could not safely be, defined
further, or the degree to which a form of words had been selected
which only said so much and no more. For such reasons as these,
private letters often seem most exquisitely adapted to their setting
when written most casually; it is exactly the extent to which
their language is careless, the proportion of carelessness they give
to the different matters in hand, which is so precise. Similarly
in conversation this more refined sort of implication is very highly
developed. It is comparable to the use of facial muscles, in-
tended for different or immensely cruder uses (such as the
muscles round the eyes designed to prevent them from being
gorged with blood when you scream), to convey fine shades of
 
* expression/ They are comparable, again, in that there are fewer
verbal devices, as there are fewer ways of moving facial muscles,
than there are sorts of feeling to convey by them ; this gives an
inherent opportunity for ambiguity which is regularly exploited.
The cult of careless ease in literature, where one is less sure of the
audience, is more treacherous, but its advantages and dangers
are of the same kind.
 
It is because of the wealth of implication which must be carried
by sentences in poetry, because they must start from scratch and
put the reader in possession of the entire attitude they assume,
that the notion of * sincerity * is important, and that it is so hard to
imitate a style. A poem can be cross-questioned, and one must
know, to feel sure that it will survive the process with undim-
 
 
 
30 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
inished reputation, that for a wide variety of possible assumptions
in the reader the assumptions of the writer will seem reasonable
enough to be adopted; and further that, for a hierarchy of
degrees of care in the reader, the assumptions discovered in the
writer will not show themselves to be self-conflicting in a way
which to such a reader will seem absurd.
 
The reason, then, that ambiguity is more elaborate in poetry
than in prose, other than the fact that the reader is trained to
expect it, seems to be that the presence of metre and rhyme,
admittedly irrelevant to the straightforward process of conveying
a statement, makes it seem sensible to diverge from the colloquial
order of statement, and so imply several colloquial orders from
which the statement has diverged. But rhythm is a powertul
weapon in itself, which needs to be considered separately; I
have discussed negative implications here by way of a sidelong
approach to it.
 
Rhythm allows one, by playing off the possible prose rhythms
against the super-imposed verse rhythms, to combine a variety of
statements in one order. Its direct effect seems a matter for
physiology ; in particular, a rhythmic beat taken faster than the
pulse seems controllable, exhilarating, and not to demand in-
timate sympathy ; a rhythmic beat almost synchronous with the
pulse seems sincere and to demand intimate sympathy; while a
rhythmic beat slower than the pulse, like a funeral bell, seems
portentous and uncontrollable. But even if it is a simple rhythm
which is apprehended, rather than something much more com-
plex which involves the meaning, still it is the meaning which
must show at what pace the verse is to be read. And, of course,
it is not one rhythmical beat, like a bell tolling, which is appre-
hended ; or if it is (since the ear insists on imposing rhythms, and
cocaine can make one stroke into a series), then the word should
be used in the plural ; the foot, the grammatical clause, the line,
the sentence, the stanza or paragraph, and the whole canto or
subject-heading, are all rhythmical units; the total rhythmical
line which results from them must be regarded as of an immense
complexity entirely defined by the meaning; and even then it is
the meaning which must imply how it is to be interpreted. So
that rhythm is chiefly useful as a means of insisting upon, and
then limiting, the possible implications ; and though I may seem
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 31
 
to be ignoring the rhythm through most of this book, I shall
always be using it, so to speak, among the calculations on the
margin, as a means of understanding the grammar.
 
However, one can oppose the use of rhythm to the use of
ambiguity, because an interest in rhythm makes a poet long-
winded, and ambiguity is a phenomenon of compression. Thus
it is seldom that one finds relevant ambiguities in Spenser or
Marlowe, because their method is by a variety of means to sustain
a poetic effect for so long that the poetic knot can be spread out
at length, and one does not see that the separate uses of a word
would be a pun if they were drawn together. When Marlowe
brings off" his triumphs of simplicity and the delight in rhythm it
is often a matter of separating the implications of a sentence and
using them at different times.
 
MEANDER. Your majesty shall shortly have your wish
 
And ride in triumph through Persepolis.
 
(Exeunt all except TAMBURLANE and his followers .)
TAMBURLANE. And ride in triumph through Persepolis.
 
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles,
 
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
 
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
 
And ride in triumph through Persepolis ?
 
Tamburlane can only use the same words again and again,
because his mind is glutted with astonishment at them; Mar-
lowe's idea of the heroic soul has extreme simplicity and un-
bounded appetite, so that after however great an expression of his
desire for glory, after one subordinate clause has opened out of
another, with unalterable energy, it can still roar at the close with
the same directness as in its opening line. Thus the lack of
variety in his rhythm is in itself a device of some rhythmical
subtlety. It is for this sort of reason that the same line is repeated
here in three tones, of obsequiousness, of astonishment, and of
triumph, which Shakespeare could have included in a single line.
 
Faustus, these books, thy wit, and our experience,
 
Shall make all nations to canonise us.
 
As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords
 
So fhall the spirits of every element
 
Be alway^ serviceable to us three ;
 
Like lions shall they guard us when we please,
 
Like Almain rutters, with their horsemen's staves,
 
 
 
32 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Or Lapland giants, trotting by oiir sides;
Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love :
From Venice shall they drag huge argosies,
And from America the golden fleece
That yearly stuffs old Philip *s treasury;
If learned Faustus will be resolute.
 
At first sight the last line is an afterthought expressing anxiety,
but when immersed in the style one accepts it as a part of the
sentence always intended, that might have been put in between
the second line and the third. That a conditional clause should
have been held back through all these successive lightnings pf
poetry, that after their achievement it should still be present with
the same conviction and resolution, is itself a statement of heroic
character. One's total impression of the character of Valdes is
obtained by combining these two interpretations. Where so
much can be said by the mere order of single mighty lines there
is no need for much subtlety of implication within them.
 
I am considering here such ambiguities of rhythm as act with-
out implying an ambiguity of grammar, or noticeable ambiguity
in the use of words. This last example in result belongs to a later
chapter, because it implies two different opinions of Valdes and
leaves them to be reconciled; so does the following example,
because it implies two different sentiments in the author. I put
them here for the slightness of the machinery ; it is a machinery
continually used for ambiguities of the first type, and these
examples may be prominent enough to show that it is powerful.
 
Aye, look, high heaven and earth ail from their prime foundation.
 
All thoughts to rive the heart are there, and all are vain;
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation ;
 
Oh why did I awake, when shall I sleep again?
 
(A. E. HOUSMAN, Last Poems.)
 
The main rhythm of the third line (the crest of the wave) takes
hate as its chief stress, and the first three nouns as a group to-
gether. Fear gives the second emphasis, allowed by the extra
foot, fear and indignation act as a unit balancing the first three,
and by attraction the fear meant is seen to be of a dignified kind.
But behind the energy and determination of this treatment of the
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 33
 
line as a unit, there is a rocking, broken, agitated, and impotent
grouping, which takes the first four nouns as two pairs, associates
fear with hate so as to make it weak and snarling, and throws in
indignation as an isolated and squeaking disapproval.
 
I have mentioned Spenser, whom no discussion of rhythm can
ignore. To show the scale of his rhythm, it may be enough to
list some of the ways in which he gave movement to the stanza
of the Faerie Queene\ it is by the delicacy of this movement that
he shows his attitude towards his sentences, rather than by
devices of implication in the sentences themselves. At the same
time, once such an attitude has been fixed, it is more easily de-
scribed in terms of the meaning of the words than in terms of the
meaning of the rhythm; in the next example, from Sidney, I
shall use this other mode of approach.
 
Spenser concentrates the reader's attention on to the move-
ment of his stanza : by the use of archaic words and construc-
tions, so that one is at a safe distance from the exercise of an
immediate judgment, by the steady untroubled flow of similar
lines, by making no rapid change of sense or feeling, by sustained
alliteration, parallel adjectives, and full statement of the acces-
sories pf a thought, and by the dreamy repetition of the great
stanza perpetually pausing at its close. Ababbcbcc is a unit which
may be broken up into a variety of metrical forms, and the ways
in which it is successively broken up are fitted into enormous
patterns. The first quatrain usually gratifies the ear directly and
without surprise, and the stanzas may then be classified by the
grammatical connections of the crucial fifth line, which must give
a soft bump to the dying fall of the first quatrain, keep it in the
air, and prevent it from falling apart from the rest of the stanza.
 
It may complete the sense of the quatrain, for instance, with a
couplet, and the stanza will then begin with a larger, more narra-
tive unit, ababby and wander garrulously down a perspective to
the alexandrine. Or it may add to the quatrain as by an after-
thought, as if with a childish earnestness it made sure of its point
without regard to the metre, and one is relieved to find that the
metre recovers itself after all. For more energetic or serious
statements it will start a new quatrain at the fifth line, with a new
sentence; there are then two smaller and tighter, repeatedly
didactic, or logically opposed, historically or advancing, units,
c
 
 
 
34 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
whose common ^rhyme serves to insist upon their contrast, which
are summed up and reconciled in the final solemnity of the alex-
andrine. In times of excitement the fifth line will be connected
both ways, so as to ignore the two quatrains, and, by flowing
straight on down the stanza with an insistence on its unity, show
the accumulated energy of some enormous climax; and again,
by being connected with neither, it will make the stanza into an
unstressed conversational device without overtones of rhythm,
picking up stray threads of the story with almost the relief of
prose. It would be interesting to take one of the vast famous
passages of the work and show how these devices are fitted to-
gether into larger units of rhythm, but having said that every use
of the stanza includes all these uses in the reader's apprehension
of it I may have said enough to show the sort of methods Spenser
had under his control ; why it was not necessary for him to con-
centrate on the lightning flashes of ambiguity.
 
The size, the possible variety, and the fixity of this unit give
something of the blankness that comes from fixing your eyes on
a bright spot; you have to yield yourself to it very completely to
take in the variety of its movement, and, at the same time, there
is no need to concentrate the elements of the situation into a judg-
ment as if for action. As a result of this, when there are ambigui-
ties of idea, it is whole civilisations rather than details of the
moment which are their elements; he can pour into the even
dreamwork of his fairyland Christian, classical, and chivalrous
materials with an air, not of ignoring their differences, but of
holding all their systems of values floating as if at a distance, so
as not to interfere with one another, in the prolonged and diffused
energies of his mind.
 
Nowhere in English literature can this use of diffuseness as an
alternative to, or peculiar branch of, ambiguity be seen more
clearly than in those lovely sestines of Sidney, which are so
curiously foreign to the normal modes or later developments of
the language. This time I must do some serious quotation.
 
STREPHON. KLAIUS.
 
STREPHON. You Gote-heard Gods, that love the grassiejrnountaines,
You nimphes that haunt the springs in pleasant valhes,
You Satyrs joyd with free and quiet forrests,
Vouchsafe your silent eares to playning musique,
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 35
 
Which to my woes gives still an early morning :
And draws the dolor on till wery evening.
 
KLAIUS. O Mercuric, foregoer to the evening,
O heavenlie huntresse of the savage mountaines,
 
lovelie starre, entitled of the morning,
While that my voice doth fill the woeful vallies
Vouchsafe your silent eares to playning musique,
Which oft hath Echo tir'd in secrete forrests.
 
STREPHON. I that was once free-burgess of the forrests
Where shade from Sunne, and sports I sought at evening,
 
1 that was once esteemed for pleasant musique,
Am banisht now amongst the monstrous mountaines
Of huge despaire, and foul afflictions vallies,
 
Am growne a skrich-owle to myself each morning.
 
KLAIUS. I that was once delighted every morning,
Hunting the wild inhabiters of forrests,
I that was once the musique of these vallies,
So darkened am, that all my day is evening,
Hart-broken so, that mole-hills seem high mountaines,
And fill the vales with cries in stead of musique.
 
STREPHON. Long since alas, my deadly Swannish musique
Hath made itself a crier of the morning,
And hath with wailing strength climbed highest mountaines :
Long since my thoughts more desert be than forrests :
Long since I see my joyes come to their evening,
And state thro wen down to over-troden vallies.
 
KLAIUS. Long since the happie dwellers of these vallies,
Have praide me leave my strange exclaiming musique,
Which troubles their dayes worke, and joyes of evening:
Long since I hate the night, more hate the morning:
Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forrests,
And make me wish myself laid under mountaines.
 
STREPHON. Me seemes I see the high and stately mountaines,
Transforme themselves to lowe dejected vallies:
Me seemes I heare in these ill-changed forrests,
The nightingales doo learne of Owles their musique :
Me seemes I feele the comfort of the morning
Turnde to the mortal serene of an evening.
 
KLAIUS. Mf seemes I see a filthie cloudie evening,
As soone as Sunne begins to climbe the mountaines:
Me seemes I feel a noisome scent, the morning
 
 
 
36 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
When I do sqnell the flowers of these vallies :
 
Me seemes I heare, when I doo heare sweet musique,
 
The dreadful cries of murdered men in forrests.
 
STREPHON. I wish to fire the trees of all these forrests;
I give the Sunne a last farewell each evening;
I curse the fiddling finders out of musique :
With envy doo I hate the lofty mountaines ;
And with despite despise the humble vallies:
I doo detest night evening, day, and morning.
 
KLAIUS. Curse to myself my prayer is, the morning:
My fire is more, than can be made with forrests;
My state more base, than are the basest vallies :
I wish no evenings more to see, each evening;
Shamed I have myself in sight of mountaines,
And stoppe mine eares, lest I go mad with musique.
 
STREPHON. For she, whose parts maintained a perfect musique,
Whose beauty shin'de more than the blushing morning,
Who much did pass in state the stately mountaines,
In straightness past the Cedars of the forrests,
Hath cast me wretch into eternal evening,
By taking her two Sunnes from these dark vallies.
 
KLAIUS. For she, to whom compared, the Alps are vallies,
She, whose lest word brings from the spheares their musique
At whose approach the Sunne rose in the evening,
Who, where she went, bare in her forehead morning,
Is gone, is gone from these our spoiled forrests,
Turning to deserts our best pastur'de mountaines.
 
STREPHON. These mountaines witness shall, so shall these vallies,
KLAIUS. These forrests eke, made wretched by our musique,
STREPHON. Our morning hymn is this,
KLAIUS. and song at evening.
 
(SIDNEY, Arcadia.)
 
The poem beats, however rich its orchestration, with a wailing
and immovable monotony, for ever upon the same doors in vain.
Mountaines, vallies, forrests; musique, evening, morning; it is at
these words only that Klaius and Strephon pause in their cries;
these words circumscribe their world; these are the bones of
their situation; and in tracing their lovelorn pastoAl tedium
through thirteen repetitions, with something of the aimless multi-
tudinousness of the sea on a rock, we seem to extract all the
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 37
 
meaning possible from these notions; we are At last, therefore,
in possession of all that might have been implied by them (if we
had understood them) in a single sentence ; of all, in fact, that is
implied by them, in the last sentence of the poem. I must glance,
to show this, at the twelve other occasions on which each word
is used.
 
Mountaines are haunts of Pan for lust and Diana for chastity,
to both of these the lovers appeal ; they suggest being shut in, or
banishment; impossibility and impotence, or difficulty and
achievement; greatness that may be envied or may be felt as your
own (so as to make you feel helpless, or feel powerful) ; they give
you the peace, or the despair, of the grave ; they are the distant
things behind which the sun rises and sets, the too near things
which shut in your valley; deserted wastes, and the ample
pastures to which you drive up the cattle for the summer.
Vallies hold nymphs to which you may appeal, and yet are the
normal places where you live; are your whole world, and yet
limited so that your voice can affect the whole of them; are
opposed to mountaines, either as places of shelter and comfort, or
as places of humility and affliction; are rich with flowers and
warmth, or are dark hollows between the hills.
Forests, though valuable and accustomed, are desolate and hold
danger; there are both nightingales and owls in them; their
beasts, though savage, give the strong pleasures of hunting; their
burning is either useful or destructive ; though wild and sterile
they give freedom for contemplation, and their trunks are symbols
of pride.
 
Music may express joy or sorrow; is at once more and less direct
than talking, and so is connected with one's permanent feeling
about the characters of pastoral that they are at once very rustic
and rather over-civilised; it may please or distress the by-
standers; and while belonging to despair and to the deaths of
swans, it may share the living beauty of the lady, and be an
inmate of the celestial spheres.
 
Morning brings hope, light and labour, evening rest, play and
despair; they are the variety of Nature, or the tedious repetition
of a day; J their patrons Venus, whom one dare not name, and
Mercury, who will bring no news of her. Morning, too, has often
attached to it a meaning which, by an intelligent and illuminating
 
 
 
38 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
misprint, is insisted upon in the eleventh (and subsequent)
 
editions :
 
At whose approach the sun rose in the evening,
Who where she went bore in her forehead mourning,
Is gone, is gone, from these our spoiled forrests,
Turning to deserts our best pastor *d mountaines.
 
The form takes its effect by concentrating on these words and
slowly building up our interest in them ; all their latent implica-
tions are brought out by the repetitions ; and each in turn is used
to build up some simple conceit. So that when the static concep-
tion of the complaint has been finally brought into light (I do not
mean by this to depreciate the sustained magnificence of its
crescendo, but to praise the singleness of its idea), a whole
succession of feelings about the local scenery, the whole way in
which it is taken for granted, has been enlisted into sorrow and
beats as a single passion of the mind.
 
I have put this poem at the end of a discussion ostensibly about
rhythm, and shall mention its rhythm only to remark that it is
magnificent; my point is that one can best illustrate its rhythm
by showing the cumulative way it uses its words. It is seldom
that the meaning of a poet's words is built up so flatly and steadily
in the course of using them. And limited as this form may be,
the capacity to accept a limitation so unflinchingly, the capacity
even to conceive so large a form as a unit of sustained feeling, is
one that has been lost since that age.
 
ANNEX ON DRAMATIC IRONY
 
* Effective in several ways' includes dramatic irony; I shall
close this chapter with some remarks about that. An example
from Macbeth has already been considered (p. 18), which imposed
the pathetic fallacy on the reader by means of an ambiguity, and
tricked him into an irrational or primitive mode of thought under
colour of talking about the view. This is an important device,
about which it is proper to elaborate the obvious; I shall con-
sider an example from the Synge Deirdre of the Sorrows.
 
Deirdre, we have been told, is uniquely beautifth; she is
being brought up alone in the woods to be old Conchubor's
queen; troubles have been foretold ; she is wilful; she has seen
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 39
 
Naisi in the woods ; she prefers him to Conchubor. Conchubor
visits her, says he will marry her in three days, and leaves her to
return to his capital. She asks her nurse, who could help her
against him, would the nurse herself, no, would this great man
or that, possibly, more possibly, would Naisi, and there is a
storm of denial :
 
LAVARCHAM. In the end of all there is none can go against
Conchubor, and it's folly that we're talking, for if any went against
Conchubor it's sorrows he'd earn and the shortening of his day
of life.
 
(She turns away, and DEIRDRE stands up stiff with excitement
and goes and looks out of the window.)
 
DEIRDRE. Are the stepping-stones flooding, Lavarcham? Will
the night be stormy in the hills ?
 
LAVARCHAM. The stepping-stones are flooding, surely, and the
night will be the worst, I'm thinking, we've seen these years gone by.
 
Upon these words Deirdre 'tears upon the press and pulls out
clothes and tapestries,' robes herself as a queen, and prepares for
the coming of the young princes.
 
This storm is dramatically effective for various reasons. As
part of the plot it makes Naisi and his brothers come for shelter
when she is wanting them ; on the classical tragic model it makes
the day of the action an unusual one, a day on which it seems
fitting that great things should happen, and gives a sort of unity
to the place by making it difficult to get there. Further, we are
in doubt as to the position of Conchubor, and this allows of
several implications. If we are to conceive that he has got across
the stepping-stones already, then their flooding means that
Deirdre's way of safety, to Conchubor and his palace and the life
which is expected of her, has been cut off; that it is high time she
behaved like the stepping-stones and isolated herself with Naisi ;
that what in the story is done heroically by her own choice is, in
dumb show, either as an encouragement or as an ironical state-
ment of the impotence of heroic action, done by the weather;
and that all these troubles which she is bringing on herself have
been foretold and are beyond her control. If we are to conceive
that Condiubor has not yet got across the stepping-stones, she
is in danger ot'being condemned to his company if he turns back,
$s, in fact, she is in any case, since he will marry her in three days ;
 
 
 
40 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
it is against a faal and frankly alien heaven that she exerts her
courage and her royalty ; the weather is now one of the inevitable
forces against which she is revolting, and is that one of those
forces which makes it urgent she should revolt now. If we are to
conceive that Conchubor is just getting across the stepping-
stones, the weather is her ally, and there is some encouragement
for revolt in the thought that he may be drowned.
 
For the storm to mean so much it must receive particular atten-
tion, and it is assured of this by marking a change in the tone of
the conversation. The preceding series of questions has received
the wrong answer at its climax; Naisi is the man who can help
her, and her nurse says he can not. Since energy has accumul-
ated towards this question, and is now dammed by the negative,
it bursts out of the window into a larger world, and since we find
there, instead of the indifference of external Nature, instead of
the calm of accepting the statement that there is no hope, a larger
release of energy and the crescendo repeated in the heavens, we
compare the storm with the plot and are surprised into a Pathetic
Fallacy. It is not that Nature is with her or against her, is her
fate or her servant; the Fallacy here claims more generally that
Nature, like the spectators, is excited into a variety of sympathies,
and is all these four together. The operation is thus a complicated
one, but it is normal, of course, to the crudest forms of melo-
drama. My point is that, for a Pathetic Fallacy to cause much
emotional reverberation, it must be imposed upon the reader by
an ambiguity.
 
Since the storm has been fixed, by all these devices, firmly in
the spectator's memory, a slight reference at the other end of the
tragedy can call it back to give another dramatic irony. Naisi has
been killed and Conchubor left in possession.
 
DEIRDRE. Do not raise a hand to touch me.
 
CONCHUBOR. There are other hands to touch you. My fighters
are set in among the trees.
 
DEIRDRE. Who'll fight the grave, Conchubor, and it opened on
a dark night?
 
The night is dark enough now, and, of course, her main meaning
is that she can't be fought after she has killed herself. 1 But she
herself could not fight against the impulses of thV night at the
beginning of the play, when she ran off with Naisi and opened the
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 41
 
graves which are only now being filled ; nor against the weariness
which is the turning-point of the action, that sense that happiness
could not last for ever which drove them back to Ireland and
their enemy. This third dark night in a sense covers the other
two; we are made, therefore, to feel that the unity of vtime, in
spite of the lovers' seven years of happiness, has somehow been
preserved. The grave, partly in consequence of this, is not that
of Deirdre only, against which Conchubor cannot fight; she is
Aopeless because she herself cannot fight against the grave in
which Naisi is lying; and there is thus a further dramatic irony
of the heroic action that defeats itself, in that it is Conchubor, as
well as Deirdre, who opened a grave, whether for her or for Naisi,
by his actions on either dark night; that Conchubor, no more
than Deirdre, can fight either of them ; that after the way Con-
chubor has killed Naisi, Deirdre cannot live to endure Conchubor
and Conchubor cannot hold Deirdre from her grave. Lastly,
there is a threat from Deirdre against Conchubor, making the
grave his as well as theirs ; her choice of death, or the forces he
has himself loosed against her, will kill him ; as indeed he is led
from the stage suddenly old and aimless and ' hard set to see the
way before him.' The grave having been spread on to three
persons now takes effect as a generalisation, and names the mor-
tality of all the protagonists, incidental soldiers included; 'all
life is strangely frustrated, all efforts incalculable and in vain ; we
are all feeble beside the forces given to us and in the face of death
all parties are on the same side.'
 
This implication, by the way, that all the characters are people
subject to the same situation, that they all understand, though
they may not take, the same attitude, is important to some types
of play and often gets called their ' meaning.' However, it is less
insisted upon than dramatic irony by critics because (being a less
conscious form of that device) it does not need to be noticed to be
appreciated, and, therefore, is at once a less likely and a less useful
thing for them to notice. For the rather limited and doctrinaire
pessimism exploited by Synge it is a powerful weapon ; consider
this piece of dialogue, when the lovers are wondering whether to
go back to Ireland, where they will find death and their proper
social position:
 
NAISI. If our time in this place is ended, come away without
 
 
 
42 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Ainnle and Ardan to the woods of the east, for it's right to be away
from all people when two lovers have their love only. Come away
and we'll be safe always.
 
DEIRDRE. There's no safe place, Naisi, on the ridge of the
world. . . . And it's in the quiet woods I've seen them digging our
grave, and throwing out the clay on leaves are bright and withered.
 
NAISI. Come away, Deirdre, and it's little we'll think of safety
or the grave beyond it, and we resting in a little corner between the
daytime and the long night.
 
DEIRDRE. It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night
where there is sleep for ever, and isn't it a better thing to be follow-
ing on to a near death, than to be bending the head down, and
dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing on love
where it is sweet and tender ?
 
e
 
These may seem absurdly simple phrases for Deirdre to twist
into her more gloomy meaning, but it was Naisi who first sug-
gested the idea from which he is now trying to reassure her ; it is
because at the back of his mind he agrees with her that upon all
phrases of comfort he can give her there lies the same shadow of
the grave. You would not find this effect so naked, so much in
command of the situation, in the Elizabethan playwrights, be-
cause there the forces that hold characters apart have got more
kick in them; the device is always at work, I think, but the
strongest example I know in Shakespeare comes from that one of
his plays which has least variety of conception, which has most
of this self-centred anxiety to maintain a single mood.
 
Sic. He's a Disease that must be cut away.
MEN. Oh, he's a limb, that has but a Disease.
 
Mortall, to cut it off; to cure it, easye. ... [It would be shameful
 
ingratitude, he goes on, if they were to kill such a hero.]
BRU. . . . when he did love his country,
 
It honour 'd him.
MEN. The service of the foote
 
Being once gangren'd, is not then respected
 
For what before it was.
BRU. Wee '11 hear no more :
 
Pursue him to his house, and pluck him thence,
 
Lest his infection, being of catching nature,
 
Spread further. t
 
MEN. One word more, one word: t
 
This Tiger-footed rage, when it shall find
 
The harme of unskann'd swiftnesse, will too (late)
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 43
 
Tye Leaden pounds too's heeles. Proceed by Processe,
Lest parties (as he is beloved) break out,
And sacke great Rome with Romanes.
 
(Coriolanus, m. i. 245.)
 
Warburton wanted to give Sicinius the speech about gangrene,
and certainly it does Coriolanus no good and is a strange speech
from one of his friends. It is no ingratitude not to ' respect a foot
for its service ' in a case of gangrene where it may be mortal not
to cut it off. Of course, you may call it an irony to state the other
side's case more strongly than they have done so far for them-
selves, but it springs from a clear understanding of their feelings;
both sides are using the same metaphor, even if they are sure they
want to draw different conclusions from it. Menenius seems
hardly less conscious of his irony in his next speech, when the
tiger-footed rage, the swiftness, and the act of scanning it too late
may belong to the tribunes or to Coriolanus himself; and it was
precisely because they proceeded by process, instead of killing him
out of hand, that Rome came so near to being sacked by a Roman
before the play was done.
 
We are concerned here with a sort of dramatic ambiguity of
judgment which does not consider the character so much as the
audience ; thus Menenius seems to have been a very direct par-
tisan of Coriolanus, but he had to agree with the tribunes to a
great extent to bring out the point of the situation they were
arguing about. Evidently this is an important means of handling
the plot, and may be used to juggle with motivation; it is these
methods which make lago so effective a villain, and such a
puzzling figure if you take his character seriously. There is a
simpler example in the casket scene of The Merchant of Venice.
Portia is far too virtuous to attempt to evade her father's devas-
tating scheme ; she fully approves of it (' If you do love me, you
will find me out'); and yet, while Bassanio is choosing, she
arranges that there should be a song continually rhyming with
'lead/ and ending in a conceit about coffins. The audience is
not really meant to think she is telling him the answer, but it is
not posed as a moral problem, and seems a natural enough thing
to do ; she might quite well do it in the belief that he would not
hear; the song is explaining to them the point about the lead
casket, may be taken to represent the fact that Bassanio under-
 
 
 
44 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
stands it, heightens the tension by repeating the problem in
another form, and adds to their sense of fitness in the third man
being the lucky one.
 
Corresponding to this doubt as to Portia's honesty is a stronger
one as to Bassanio's affection; he seems superior to the other
suitors only in the most incidental qualities, and is more frankly
marrying for money than any of them. But Shakespeare loved
his arrivistes for their success, their shamelessness and their self-
deception, and Bassanio is justified by the song which leads him
to choose rightly. Fancy is nothing, fancy is fleeting, and yet it
is all that the dignity of poetry is based upon, and we must ring
its knell as for the life of man. Lead, a fundamental mere human-
ity, eventual death, must be accepted, must be chosen, before
one can get what one wants, and can go on with the poetry of the
play; fancy can only hide lead, and lead must be enough for the
maintenance of fancy.
 
Irony in this subdued sense, as a generous scepticism which
can believe at once that people are and are not guilty, is a very
normal and essential method ; Portia's song is not more incon-
sistent than the sorrow of Helen that she has brought death to so
many brave men, and the pride with which she is first found
making tapestries of them ; than the courage of Achilles, which
none will question, ' in his impregnable armour with his invulner-
able skin underneath it ' ; than the sleepers in Gethsemane, who,
St. Luke says, were sleeping for sorrow; than the way Thesee (in
Racine), by the use of a deity, at once kills and does not kill
Hippolyte. This sort of contradiction is at once understood in
literature, because the process of understanding one's friends
must always be riddled with such indecisions and the machinery
of such hypocrisy; people, often, cannot have done both of two
things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have
done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in
their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect
if they had acted differently ; they are only to be understood by
bearing both possibilities in mind.
 
Dramatic irony is an interesting device for my purpose, be-
cause it gives an intelligible way in which the reader can be
reminded of the rest of a play while he is reading a single part of
it. Thus it gives one some means of understanding the view of
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 45
 
a work of genius as a sort of miracle whose style carries its per-
sonality into every part of it, whose matter consists of microcosms
of its form, and whose flesh has the character of the flesh of an
organism. For example the messengers in hailing Macbeth
Thane of Cawdor tell him that Duncan
 
findes thee in the stout Norweyan Rankes,
Nothing affeard of what thyselfe didst make,
Strange images of death.
 
This remark does not seem to belong very straightforwardly to
the speech of a state messenger; it is not obvious why he expects
a soldier to be frightened of his enemies only when he had made
them harmless ; but it is just what Macbeth was to feel about
Duncan ; if the king said this he must have known a great deal
about Macbeth's habits of mind. One feels the conceit must
have arisen, in a mood of moral casuistry, from a sense of the
oddity in that reliance on convention which gives such different
reactions to killing at different times; murder as well as soldier-
ing, therefore, were in the mind of the speaker, and are suggested
to the audience. Or the negative, more simply, works backwards ;
there is some question of Macbeth's being affeard of corpses;
and this impression of him, given so early in the play, as a power-
ful and horrified figure, yielding nothing to the horror of his
situation, striking out endlessly at the images of death that bank
round him and shut him in, is as it were a piece of dramatic irony
on its own account, gives in brief a total impression of the play,
and puts no stress on the complementary part of the irony, which
it assumes :
 
I am afraid, to think what I have done:
Looke on *t againe I dare not.
 
In this case, the two parts of the irony convey almost all their
point separately, without your having to remember one when
hearing the other. But, in many cases, Shakespeare does not
help one in this way, and gives ironies for the pleasure rather of
commentators than of first-night audiences. I shall close this
desultory d ; scussion with such an example. Cordelia will say
nothing to show her love or gain her portion.
 
LEAR. Nothing will come of nothing, speak againe.
 
 
 
46 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Six hundred Ijnes later, the Fool sings some nonsense verses.
 
LEAR. This is nothing, foole.
 
FOOL. Then 'tis like the breath of an unfee'd Lawyer, you gave
me nothing for 't. Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle ?
 
LEAR. Why no, Boy.
Nothing can be made out of nothing.
 
FOOL (to Kent). Prithee tell him, so much the rent of his land
comes to, he will not beleeve a Fool.
 
If you fail to connect the second of these with the first, the pain
of loss, and the nagging of the Fool, are almost all that the
second can be taken to imply. Only if this quite distant con-
nection is consciously achieved can you realise Lear's meaning;
that he, rather than Cordelia, was the beggar for love on that
occasion ; that she might well say nothing, if she had known how
he would act to her ; that, perhaps, it was no fault of his that had
spoiled Regan and Goneril, since no upbringing could have
made anything of them; that these words anyway are the ripe
fruit of his experience ; and that there is indeed nothing that can
be made out of him, now that he has become nothing by the loss
of everything in his world. (He is speaking with a curiously
intimate affection and disregard for dignity, as if the Fool's talk
was probably his own hallucination, since it gives a love that need
not be paid for; and it is true that the Fool acts as a sort of
divided personality externalised from the "King;) Most people
are so used to the text that they do .'ftat^re^lise how much the
effect depends on a verbal irony, whfck \t would be a feat of
memory to notice at the first hearing.
 
Possibly the richness of the deposit of cross-reference and
incidental detail upon these plays may be due in some degree to
the circumstances under which they were written; to the fact
that Shakespeare wrote up plays already owned by his company,
and in use, so that he and the actors already knew a great deal
about them; to the way his version might always receive addi-
tions and alterations for a revival or a special occasion at Court;
to the probability that a particular member of the company
would keep to a particular part ; and to the shortness of individual
runs. The last reason would keep the actors frombeing bored
with the text; the other reasons would give tHem a casual but
detailed knowledge (of the sort that leads to flippant quotation
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 47
 
in the greenroom), a desire for continual additioijs, a capacity to
see distant verbal connections, and a well-informed interest in
the minor characters of the story. Shakespeare seems to assume
all this in his public, and can scarcely have obtained it from any
one outside. There are some odd and pathetic relics of the state
of feeling I mean in the mistakes of the folio stage directions,
where Lord E and Lord G, for minor characters in AIVs Well, are
presumably the initials of actors; French "; Capt. G; faint
traces of the geniality of long-past rehearsals, when they were
scribbled into the prompt copy. French E and Lord G, at any
rate, knew what the words were three hundred lines back; for
French E and Lord G (they would be pleased to know more about
their own characters), one could drop in such details as allowed
Professor Bradley to treat the plays as documents from which to
draw full-length biographies ; if for no other, still for an audience
upon the stage, one could make those delicate cross-references
that are now the discoveries of the learned.
 
 
 
II
 
rpHERE are three possible scales or dimensions, that seem of
JL reliable~importance, along whicR ambiguities may be spread
out : the degree of logical or grammatical disorder, the degree tp
which the apprehension of the ambiguity must be conscious, and
the degree ol psychological complexity concerned. Of these, the
first seems the one about which there is least danger of talking
nonsense, the one it is most important to be clear about, and the
one to which least critical attention has so far been paid. My
seven types, so far as they are not merely a convenient framework,
are intended as stages of advancing logical disorder. However,
I shall continually have to be using and discussing the other two
criteria, and the three are not wholly independent of one another,
so that my later examples will, as a rule, appear to the casual eye
'really' more ambiguous than the earlier ones.
 
An example of the secondtyp^jotambiguity, in word or syntax,
occurs* wfaenJaKQ or moriTmcaningf are resolved into one, There
are alternatives, evenin the mind of the author, not only different
emphases as in the first type ; but an ordinary good reading can
extract one resultant from them. This is more common than any
of the later types, and 1 shall giveTt most space.
 
The following example shows, I think, the difference between
logical and psychological degrees of ambiguity; because the
thought is complicated or at least doubtful, whereas the feeling
is very direct.
 
J Cupid is winged and doth range;
Her country so my love doth change.
But change she earth, or change she sky,
Yet I will love her till I die.
 
(ANON., Oxford Book.)
 
* I will love her though she moves from this part of the earth to one
out of my reach; I will love her though she goes to live under
different skies; I will love her though she moves from this
earth and sky to another planet ; I will love her though she moves
into a social or intellectual sphere where I cannot follow; I will
love her though she alters the earth and sky Irhave got now,
though she destroys the bubble of worship in which I am now
 
4 8
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 49
 
living by showing herself unworthy to be its objpci ; I will love
her though, being yet worthy of it, by going away she changes
my earth into desire and unrest, and my heaven into despair; I
will love her even if she has both power and will to upset both the
orderly ideals of men in general (heaven) and the system of
society in general (earth) ; she may alter the earth and sky she has
now by abandoning her faith or in just punishment becoming
outcast, and still I will love her; she may change my earth by
killing me, but till it comes I will go on loving.y
 
This may look as if I was merely listing different sorts of
change, which would not, of course, show direct ambiguity; but
change may mean 'move to another' or 'alter the one you have
gofc,' and earth may be the lady's private world, or the poet's, or
that of mankind at large. All meanings to be extracted from
these are the immediate meaning insisted upon by the words, and
yet the whole charm of the poem is its extravagant, its unreason-
able simplicity.
 
But, in general, complexity of logical meaning ought to be
based on complexity of thought, even where, as is proper to the
second type of ambiguity, there is only one main meaning as a
resultant. For instance, if it is an example of the first type to
use a metaphor which is valid in several ways, it is an example of
the second to use several different metaphors at once, as Shake-
speare is doing in the following example. 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.
 
As a resounding example, then, there is Macbeth's
 
If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly ;
 
(double syntax since you may stop at the end of the line)
 
If th' Assassination
 
Could trammell up the Consequence, and catch
W^th his surcease, Success; that but . . .
 
words hissed in* the passage where servants were passing, which
must be swaddled with darkness, loaded as it were in themselves
 
D
 
 
 
50 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
with fearful powers, and not made too naked even to his own
mind. Consequence means causal result, and the things to follow,
though not causally connected, and, as in 'a person of conse-
quence,' the divinity that doth hedge a king. Trammel was a
technical term used about netting birds, hobbling horses in some
particular way, hooking up pots, levering, and running trolleys
on rails. Surcease means completion, stopping proceedings in
the middle of a lawsuit, or the overruling of a judgment; the
word reminds you of * surfeit 1 and * decease,' as does assassination
of hissing and ' assess ' and, as in * supersession,' through seder e, of
knocking down the mighty from their seat. His may apply to
Duncan, assassination or consequence. Success means fortunate
result, result whether fortunate or not, and succession to Vhe
throne. And catch, the single little flat word among these
monsters, names an action ; it is a mark of human inadequacy to
deal with these matters of statecraft, a child snatching at the
moon as she rides thunder-clouds. The meanings cannot all be
remembered at once, however often you read it; it remains the
incantation of a murderer, dishevelled and fumbling among the
powers of darkness.
 
It is clear that ambiguity, not of word, but of grammar, though
common enough in poetry, cannot be brought to this pitch with-
out chaos, and must in general be used to produce a different
effect. Where there is a single main meaning (the case we are
now considering) the device is used, as in the following examples
from Shakespeare Sonnets, to give an interpenetrating and, as it
were, fluid unity, in which phrases will go either with the sen-
tence before or after and there is no break in the movement of
the thought.
 
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell,
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence, but sweetness tell.
 
(xciii.)
 
You may put a full stop either before or after the third line.
 
That tongue that tells the story of thy days
 
(Making lascivious comments on thy sport)
 
Cannot dispraise, but in a kind of praise,
 
Naming thy name, blesses an ill report. (xcv.)
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 51
 
The subject of blesses is either tongue or naming, yid but in a kind
of praise qualifies either blesses or dispraise. These devices are
particularly useful in managing the sonnet form because they
help it to combine variety of argumentation and the close-knit
rhythmical unity of a single thought.
 
There is in the following Sonnet one of those important and
frequent subtleties of punctuation, which in general only convey
rhythm, but here it amounts to a point of grammar.
 
If thou survive my well contented daye
When that churle death my bones with dust shall cover
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey :
These poor rude lines of thy deceased Lover :
t Compare them with the bettering of the time, . . . (xxxii.)
 
Line 4 is isolated between colons, carries the whole weight of the
pathos, and is a pivot round which the rest of the Sonnet turns.
Re-survey might conceivably be thought of as intransitive, so that
line 4 could go with line 5 in apposition to them, but the point is
not that either line 3 or line 5 could stand without line 4, it is in
fact next to both of them, and yet it stands out from either, as if
the Sonnet had become more conscious of itself, or was making a
quotation from a tombstone.
 
Thou doost love her, because thou knowest I love her,
 
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
 
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her,
 
If I loose thee, my loss is my love's gaine,
 
And loosing her, my friend hath found that losse. . . . (xlii.)
 
According as line 3 goes backwards or forwards, the subject of
suffering is either she or /. The device is not here merely a
rhythmic one, but it carries no great depth of meaning; the
Elizabethans were trained to use lines that went both ways, for
example in those chains of Sonnets, such as the Corona of Donne,
in which each began with the last line of the one before.
 
Donne, indeed, uses these methods with vehemence; I shall
break this series from the Sonnets for a moment to quote an
example from the Epithalamion for Valentine's Day.
 
Thou mak'st a Taper see
Wha^the sunne never saw, and what the Arke
(Which was of Soules, and beasts, the cage, and park)
Did not containe, one bed containes, through thee,
Two Phoenixes, whose joyned breasts . . .
 
 
 
52 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
4 You make a taper see what the ark did not contain. Through
you one bed contains two phoenixes.' 'You make a taper see
what the sun never saw. Through you one bed contains what
the ark did not contain, that is, two phoenixes/ The renewal of
energy gained from starting a new sentence is continually
obtained here without the effect of repose given by letting a
sentence stop.
 
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
 
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
 
Against the stormy gusts of winter's day
 
And barren rage of death's eternal cold ?
 
O none but unthrifts, dear my love you know,
 
You had a Father, let your Son say so. (xiii.) ^
 
The phrase in italics is equally suited to the sentences before
and after it ; taking it as the former, a third meaning shows itself
faintly, that you know unthrifts \ ' the company you keep may be
riotous or ascetic, but is not matrimonial.' Having quoted this
for a comparatively trivial point of grammar, it seems worth
pointing out that its beauty depends first on the puns, house and
husbandry, and secondly on the shift of feeling from winter's day,
winter is short, like its days ; * your child will grow up after you
and your house will survive to see another summer,' to death's
eternal cold', ' if the house does not survive this winter it falls for
ever'; there is a contrast between these two opposite ideas and
the two open, similarly vowelled, Marlowan lines that contain
them, which claim by their structure to be merely repeating the
same thought, so that the two notions are dissolved into both of
them, and form a regress of echoes.
 
Sometimes the ambiguous phrase is a relative clause, with
'that' omitted, which is able to appear for a moment as an in-
dependent sentence on its own, before it is fitted into the
grammar. *
 
Their images I lov'd, I view in thee,
 
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me. (xxxi.)
 
There is some suggestion that the first clause may be wholly
independent, and that / view in thee means * I look : i c or them in
you'; but on the whole the device merely puts "which I loved'
into special prominence.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 53
 
My life hath in this line some interest, *
 
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review,
The very part was consecrate to thee, (Ixxiv.)
 
Passing over the comma at the end of the third line, the object of
review is part ; stressing the comma, it says tautologically, with
the emphasis on the second thou, 'it is enough immortality for
Trie to be remembered by you/ and the fourth line becomes a
separate sentence. 1
 
This fluidity of grammar is partly given by rhetorical balance,
because since the lines are opposed to one another in regular
pairs you still get some sort of opposition by opposing the wrong
pair. Sonnet Ixxxi. runs this principle to death :
 
Or shall I live your Epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortall life shall have,
Though I (once gone) to all the world must dye,
The earth can yeeld me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lye,
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall ore-read,
And toungs to be, your beeing shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
 
You still shall live (such vertue hath my Pen)
 
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
 
Any two consecutive lines in this, except 2-3 and 10-11 for acci-
dental reasons, make a complete sentence when separated from
their context; I do not say that this makes it a good sonnet, or
that I know it ought to be read aloud.
 
Tongues can over-read as well as eyes, and this would leave
either being the subject of rehearse, or both tongues and eyes.
However, tongues is particularly connected with rehearse, because
the contrast of your being with to be ('in order to be') shows the
transient tongues rehearsing your ideal being, lapping up your
blood as it were, and thus implies a sort of timeless Platonic
existence for Mr. W. H., informing the examples of his type, but
in no way dependent on them. These shadows of his perfection
 
1 A trivial example omitted here.
 
 
 
54 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
were once to have been his children, but Shakespeare's partly
scoptophile desire to see him settled in love has by now been with
a painful irony thwarted or over-satisfied, and they are now no
more than those who read his praise.
 
The following Sonnet is more two-faced in idea (' a complaint
in the form of an assertion that he has no right to complain'), but
can be put in the second type so far as concerns the ambiguity
of syntax, as it reduces to a single meaning :
 
O let me suffer (being at your beck)
 
The imprisoned absence of your liberty,
 
And patience tame, to sufferance bide each check,
 
Without accusing you of injury.
 
Be where you list, your charter is so strong *
 
That you yourself may privilege your time
 
To what you will, to you it doth belong,
 
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime. (Iviii.)
 
And patience tame expresses petulance by its contraction of mean-
ing (' suffer tame patience ' ; * be patience-tame,' as in iron-hard ;
and 'tame patience,' as in bide each check) followed by a rush of
equivocal words, clinched with belong, which has for subject both
your time and to pardon, and implies, still with sweetness and
pathos (it is an extraordinary balance of feeling), ' that is all I
could have expected of you.'
 
Bvt wherefore do not you a mightier waie
 
Make warre vppon this bloudie tirant time ?
 
And fortifie your selfe in your decay
 
With meanes more blessed than my barren rime ?
 
Now stand you on the top of happie houres,
 
And many maiden gardens yet unset,
 
With vertuous wish would beare your liuing flowers,
 
Much Hker then your painted counterfeit :
 
So should the lines of life that life repaire
 
Which this (Times pencil or my pupil pen)
 
Neither in inward worth nor outward faire
 
Can make you Hue your selfe in eyes of men,
To give away your selfe, keeps your selfe still,
And you must Hue drawn by your owne sweet skill.
 
(xvi.)
 
Lines of life refers to the form of a personal appearance, in the
young man himself or repeated in his descendants (as one speaks
of the lines of some one's figure) ; time's wrinkles on that face
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 55
 
(suggested only to be feared) ; the young man's lj ne or lineage
his descendants; lines drawn with a pencil a portrait; lines
drawn with a pen, in writing; the lines of a poem (the kind a
Sonnet has fourteen of); and destiny, as in the life-line of
palmistry Merchant of Venice, n. ii. 163.
 
This variety of meaning is rooted more effectively in the con-
text because lines of life and that life may either of them be taken
as subject of repair ; taking the most prominent meanings,
* lineage' and 'the features of yourself and your children/ lines
is subject, and this is also insisted upon by rhythm and the usual
sentence order; that life means 'life such as your present one.'
But that life (repair) is given a secondary claim to the position
b$ this (. . . make), which follows, evidently in contrast, as subject
in the next line. (Punctuations designed to simplify the passage
all spoil the antithesis.) This has a bracket expanding its mean-
ings : time, bringing old age that will pencil you with wrinkles,
or a riper manhood that will complete your beauty; this Times
pencil, firstly, the style of painting, or average level of achieve-
ment, of Elizabethan portrait-painters ; secondly, the frame and
'atmosphere' given to beauty by that age of masques and
gorgeous clothing and the lust of the eye (so that we must look
back to the second line of the Sonnet, where the same double
meaning is hinting that beautiful courtiers in the wake of Essex
came to bad ends) ; my pen that describes you, pupil as immature
and unskilful : as pupil of that time whose sonnet tradition I am
imitating ; or of Time which matures me. A natural way to take
it is that life, 'your life,' and this, 'my life' (devoted to describing
you), but the meaning of this opens out into all the transient
effects which are contrasted with the solid eternity of reproduc-
tion, and by reflection backwards that life is made subject of its
sentence, meaning ' the new way of life I propose to you,' that is,
of matrimony, or of the larger extra-human life in your lineage
as a whole.
 
Independently of whether lines of life or that life is subject and
whether that life is ' your present way of life ' or * the way of life
I propose to you,' there is a double syntax for lines n and 12.
Taking thfem together there is a main reading, ' the age of Eliza-
beth is not coftipetent to express you, either in your appearance
or character' (of the two pairs one would naturally associate the
 
 
 
56 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
artist's pencil v^ith outward fair , and the playwright's pen with
inward worthy but the order is the other way round, so that each
works with either, or * I try to write about your beauty, but the
hand of time, graving the lines of character on your face, tries to
show your inward worth'). This, the main grammar, involves a
rather clumsy change from life to you in the object, and this
greater directness of address, needed after the sagging of grammar
in the extraordinary complexity of the intervening two lines,
leaves room for an alternative syntax. For, taking line 1 1 with
10 (and preferably that life as subject), it is this which is not fair
either in inward or outward worth; make, of the present age,
which has produced out of its worthlessness such a beauty as
yours, is opposed to repair of the vegetable life, capable of pro-
ducing many such flowers, which I propose to you; as if the
greater durability given to a type by making it repeatable, giving
it to a noble house rather than a single person, was compared to
making it anew, as 'risen a heavenly body/ in the next world, or
to the placing of it timelessly among Platonic ideas, so that it need
not be anxious about its particular patterns on earth ; live of line
12 then becomes an adjective, and the force of so many words in
apposition, you, live, yourself, is to express wonder at the produc-
tion of such a thing out of the dull world of line 1 1, and make the
young man, by contrast, ideal, heavenly, or worthy of being made
into a general type. Line 13, separated from lines 12 and 14
equally by commas, is as a main meaning cut off into the final
couplet, * you are not less yourself because you have had children,'
but in the minor sense has for subject this, ' your present life of
pleasure and brilliance carries in it no eternity, and keeps you
only to give you away.' Drawn of line 14 then may take an addi-
tional echo of meaning, as * drawing back,' dragging yourself out
of your present way of life, which your lover has not power to
do for you. 1
 
1 There may after all be misprints in the text. The doubt as to whether
that life is subject or object, I now feel, does not add anything important to
the meanings deduced. Also one should probably put a full stop at the end
of the twelfth line to cut out the overrun syntax for the final couplet, which
is assumed to be a final summing up. The Christian paradox of tte thirteenth
line could still be taken either way round.
 
The stops of the first edition of the Shakespeare Sonnets of course do
not deserve reverence ; you sometimes even get a comma at the end of a
sonnet. The claim for them is that they always deserve consideration because
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 57
 
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 under-
standing, 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,
ajid 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 realised. This is a pity, but however
wise the view may be that poetry cannot safely be analysed, it
seems to me to remain ignoble ; and in so far as people are sure
that their pleasures will not bear thinking about, I am surprised
that they have the patience not to submit them to so easy a de-
struction. The fact is, if analysis gets in your way, it is easy
enough to forget it ; I do not think that all these meanings should
pass through the mind in an appreciative reading of this Sonnet ;
what is gathered is the main sense, the main form and rhythm,
and a general sense of compacted intellectual wealth, of an
elaborate balance of variously associated feeling.
 
One is tempted to think of these effects as belonging to the
later stages of Renaissance refinement, as something oversophisti-
cated in the manner of Caroline shape-poems, and due to a
peculiar clotting of the imagination. It is worth while then to
 
they seem to be an inaccurate but unedited version of what Shakespeare
actually wrote.
 
However, I don't want this note to suggest that the Elizabethans weren't
capable of making an ambiguity as to whether a noun is subject or object.
One might expect the resulting muddle to be too radical to be effective,
or anyway to form a habit. But it is not hard to find cases of ' lyrical ease '
where the problem is not felt to arise.
 
Sleep is a reconciling,
 
A rest that peace begets,
Doth not the sun rise smiling
 
When fair at even he sets ?
Rest you then, rest, sad eyes,
 
Melt not in weeping,
 
While she lies sleeping
Softly now lies
* Sleeping. (ANON. : set by Dowland.)
 
Whether rest begefs peace or peace rest (or peace sleep) is not a grammatical
problem because each does either, just as it is the same sun which comes
back after the night as before.
 
 
 
58 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
produce examples from Troilus and Criseyde, as one of the most
leisurely, simplest as to imagery, and earliest poems in English
literature. In the first love scene between the two, Criseyde says
petulantly she doesn't know what she's expected to say; what
does he mean, now, in plain words?
 
What that I mene, O swete herte dere ?
Quod Troilus. O goodly fresshe free.
That with the stremes of your eyen clere
You wolde frendly sometimes on me see ;
And then agreen that I may be he. ...
 
(iii. 128.)
 
and so on for three verses, an enthusiastic and moving state-
ment of the chivalric evasion of the point at issue. Stremes has
the straightforward meaning of 'beams of light' (Compleynte
unto Pite, line 94). The N.E.D. does not give this meaning, but
shows stremes as already a hyperbolical commonplace use for
blood and tears, or ' beams of sweet influence,' like those of the
Pleiades. Thus after fresh and free, there is some implication of
a stream (Naiads) that he can drink of and wash in, cleansing and
refreshing, so that one glance of her eyes recovers him as by
crossing a stream you break the spells of black magic, or the
scent by which the hounds of your enemies are tracking you
down ; and the ready tears of her sympathy are implied faintly,
as in the background.
 
At the climax of the great scene in the second book, when
Pandarus has got his ward alone to talk to her about her money
affairs, mysteriously congratulated her on her good luck, and
gradually led her through the merits of Troilus to an appeal to
her pity for his unhappiness, Cressida seems suddenly to guess
his meaning and makes a great display of outraged virtue. One
must not suppose, of course, because Chaucer shows us her
machinery *I shal fele what he meneth, I-wis' 'It nedeth me
ful sleyly for to pleye' that we are not to believe in the reality
of the virtue, or that it is not the modest and proper machinery.
 
What ? Is this al the joye and al the feste ?
 
Is this your reed, is this my blisful cas?
 
Is this the verray mede of your biheste ?
 
Is al this peynted proces seyd, alas,
 
Right for this fyn ? (ii. 421 .)
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 59
 
The last three lines, I submit, are extremely, Shakespearean ;
they have all the concentrated imagery, the bright central meta-
phor steeped and thickened in irrelevant incidental metaphors,
of his mature style. I thought at first the meanings might have
been quite simple in Chaucer's English, and have acquired a
patina of subtlety in the course of time ; it would have been fun
to maintain that Shakespeare learnt his style from a misunder-
$tanding of Chaucer; but the N.E.D. leaves no doubt that
(whether Shakespeare was influenced by it or not) time has faded
rather than enriched the original ambiguity.
 
Reed, of course, is advice ; he had told her her cas was blisful,
to have caught the eye of the prince ; mede meant at that time
wages, a bribe, merit, a meadow and a drink made with honey;
biheste meant a vow, a promise, and a command ; proces meant a
series of actions, the course of a narrative, proceedings in an
action at law, and a procession; andfyn meant generally 'end/
with accepted derivatives like the object of an action, death, and a
contract; by itself it would not suggest a money penalty before
1500, but it might suggest 'money offered in the hope of ex-
emption/ Thus the materials are ample enough, but this is not
to say they were all used.
 
I shall pause to illustrate the force of beheste and the harangue
of Pandarus that has gone before :
 
Now understand, that I yow nought requere
To binde ye to him thorough no beheste,
But only that yew make him bettre chere,
Than ye had don er this, and more feste,
So that his life be saved, at the leste.
 
Either ' I do not ask it, as a command from your guardian, that you
should bind yourself to him (permanently or sinfully)/ or 'I do
not ask you to bind yourself to him with anything so definite as
a vow'
 
Think eke, how elde wasteth every houre
In eche of yow a party of beautee ;
And therefore, er that age thee devoure,
Go love, for olde, ther wol no wight of thee.
Lat^his proverbe a lore unto yow be;
* To late y-war, quod Beautee, whan it paste';
And elde daunteth daunger at the laste.
 
 
 
60 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
It is not at first rplain why there is so much power of song in the
poetical commonplace of the first four lines; why its plainest
statement seems to imply a lyric; so that the modern reader feels
the pre-Raphaelites in it, and Chaucer felt in it his Italians
(Filostrato, ii. 54). A statement of the limitations of human life
is a sort of recipe for producing humility, concentration, and
sincerity in the reader; it soothes, for instance, jealousy, makes
the labours of the practical world less pressing because less likely
to make any real difference (games have the same mode of
approach); sets the mind free, therefore, to be operated on by
the beauty of the verse without distraction; and makes you
willing to adopt, perhaps to some slight extent permanently, the
point of view of the poet or of the character described, because,
having viewed your limits, marked your boat's position with re-
gard to distant objects on the shore, you are able without losing
your bearings to be turned round or moved to another part of
the bay.
 
Further, to think of human life in terms of its lowest factors,
considered as in themselves dignified, has a curious effect in
dignifying the individual concerned; makes him a type, and so
something larger and more significant than before; makes his
dignity feel safer, since he is sure he has at least these qualifica-
tions for it ; makes him feel accepted and approved of by his herd,
in that he is being humble and understanding their situation
(poor creatures) ; makes it seem likely, since he understands their
situation, because he feels it in himself, that they will return to
him also this reserved and detached sympathy; makes him,
indeed, feel grander than the rest of his herd, for a new series of
reasons; because by thinking of them he has got outside them;
because by forming a concept of them he has made them seem
limited; because he has thereby come to seem less subject to the
melancholy truths he is recognising; because to recognise melan-
choly truths is itself, if you can be protected somehow, an in-
vigorating activity; and (so that we complete the circle back to
humility) because to think about these common factors has a
certain solidity and safety in that it is itself, after all, one of the
relevant common factors of the human mind. *
 
However, it is the mode of action of the last two lines which is
my immediate business. Y-war may mean prudent or experi-
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 61
 
enced ; too late, ' Then first when too late/ or ' going on until too
late/ * First prudent when too late* I have found that one
should be careful to avoid risks, perhaps such as that of never
getting a lover, but, more strongly, such as are involved in un-
lawful satisfactions. * First conscious when too late'* I have
found too late that one should be determined to obtain satisfac-
tion. c Having been prudent until too late ' I have found that
one can wait too long for the safest moment for one's pleasures.
**Having been conscious till too late ' I have found that one can
seek one's pleasure once too often. Pandarus, of course, only
meant the second and third ; Chaucer (it is shown not as irony
but as a grand overtone of melancholy) meant all four. (This, by
the way, is the fourth type of ambiguity, but I am taking the
whole passage together.) 1
 
And elde daunteth daunger at the last.
 
Daunt means subdue or frighten; daunger at this time had a
wealth of meaning that it has since lost, such as disdain, imperi-
ousness, liability, miserliness, and power. 'Old age will break
your pride, will make you afraid of the independence you are now
prizing; the coming of old age is stronger than the greatness of
kings, stronger than all the brutal powers that you are now afraid
of, stronger even than the stubborn passion of misers that defeat
it for so long; you must act now because when you are old you
will be afraid to take risks, and you may take heart because, how-
ever badly you are caught, it will be all the same after another
century; even in your own lifetime, by the time you are an old
woman you will have lived down scandal.' Or taking elde as an
old woman, not as the age that defeats her, the phrase interacts
with the passing of beauty, whether after a life of sin or of
seclusion (there appear to have been no alternatives) in the pre-
ceding line, and the old hag is finally so ugly that all the powers
in daunger shrink away from the gloom of her grandeur, are either
lost to her or subdued to her, and the amorous risks and adven-
tures will be at last afraid to come near.
 
1 A dramatic irony as such need not be called fourth-type, but this one,
I think, marks a complexity of feeling in Chaucer (that is, he half agreed with
Pandarus and half not). I don't think there are other examples in this
chapter which properly belong in later chapters.
 
 
 
62 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
The line is ^ straightforward ambiguity of the second type,
and I hope the reader will not object that I have been making up
a poem of my own. Mr. Eliot somewhere says that is always
done by bad critics who have failed to be poets ; this is a valuable
weapon but a dangerously superficial maxim, because it obscures
the main crux about poetry, that being an essentially suggestive
act it can only take effect if the impulses (and to some extent
the experiences) are already there to be called forth; that the
process of getting to understand a poet is precisely that of con-
structing his poems in one's own mind. Of course, it is wrong to
construct the wrong poem, and I have no doubt Mr. Eliot was
right in his particular accusations.
 
Is this the verray mede of youre beheste ?
Is this your reed, is this my blisful cas?
 
replies Cressida, to these ambiguities of Pandarus : * Is this the
wage that is offered to me in return for obeying your commands ?
Is this my inducement to be a good ward, that I must continually
have the trouble, and pain to think you so wicked, of repelling
solicitations ? Is this what your advice is worth ? Is this what
your promise to look after me is worth?' The honest meaning
(wage) carries contempt; the dishonest meaning (bribe) an
accusation. * Is this why the prince has been so friendly with
you? Is this what you stand to make out of being my
guardian ? * And if mede carries any echo of meaning (it is im-
possible at this distance of time to say) from the natural freedom
of the open meadow, or the simple delightfulness of that form of
beer, we have, * Is this the meadow, or the beer, you had promised
me, or proposed for yourself? Is this my blissful case you have
described ? * It is the two meanings of beheste which give her so
powerful a weapon against Pandarus, in his double position of
guardian and go-between.
 
Is al this peynted proces seyd, alas,
Right for this fyn ?
 
These two lines have a lesser but a more beautiful complexity;
Pandarus' great harangue is seen, by using the puns bnfyn and
process, as a brightly coloured procession (peynted would suggest
frescoes in churches) moving on, leading her on, to dusty death
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 63
 
and the everlasting bonfire ; and behind this simple framework,
that gives the movement, the immediate point, of the phrase,
process hints at a parallel with legal proceedings, ending where
none of the parties wanted, when at last the lawyers, like Pan-
dams, stop talking and demand to be paid; and rising behind
that again, heard in the indignation of the phrase, is a threat that
she may expose him, and peyn-ttd and fyn suggest legal pains
and penalties.
 
'To whom do they suggest these things?' the reader may ask;
and there is no obvious reply. It depends how carefully the
passage is supposed to be read; in a long narrative poem the
stress on particular phrases must be slight, most of the lines do
ncft expect more attention than you would give to phrases of a
novel when reading it aloud ; you would not look for the same
concentration of imagery as in a lyric. On the other hand, a long
poem accumulates imagery; I am dealing with a particularly
dramatic point where the meaning needs to be concentrated; and
Chaucer had abandoned his original for a moment to write on
his own.
 
It is a more crucial question how farpeynted, in a proper setting,
can suggest * pains ' ; how far we ought to leave the comparatively
safe ground of ambiguity to examine latent puns. The rule in
general, I believe, is that a mere similarity of sound will not take
effect unless it is consciously noticed, and will then give an im-
pression of oddity. For it is the essential discipline of language
that our elaborate reactions to a word are called out only by the
word itself, or what is guessed to be the word itself; they are
trained to be very completely inhibited by anything near the
word but not quite right. It is only when a word has been passed
in, accepted as sensible, that it is allowed to echo about in the
mind. On the other hand, this very inhibition (the effort of dis-
tinction, in cases where it would have been natural to have taken
the other word) may call forth effects of its own; that, for
instance, is why puns are funny; may make one, perhaps, more
ready, or for all I know rhythmically more and less ready, to
react to the word when it comes. I have sometimes wondered
whether Swinburne's Dolores gets any of its energy from the way
the word Spain, suggested by the title and by various things in
the course of the poem, although one is forced to wonder what
 
 
 
64 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
the next rhyme is going to be, never appears among the dozen
that are paired off with Our Lady of Pain. But so little is known
about these matters that it is rather unwise to talk about them;
one goes off into Pure Sound and entirely private associations;
for instance, I want to back up my ' pains * frompeynted by calling
in * weighted* and 'fainted,' and the suggestion of labour in all
that painted. The study of subdued bad puns may be very
important, but it is less hopeful than the study of more rational
ambiguities, because you can rely on most word associations
being called out (if one's mind does not in some way run
through the various meanings of a word, how can it arrive at
the right one ?), whereas the puns, in a sense, ought not to be
there at all.
 
A good illustration of this point, not that most people will
require to be convinced of it, is given by the words * rows' and
4 rose.' * Rows' suggests regimentation, order, a card index
system, and the sciences; 'rose' suggests a sort of grandeur in
the state of culture, something with all the definiteness and inde-
pendence of Nature that has been produced within the systems
of mankind (giving a sort of proof of our stability), some of the
overtones of richness, delicacy, and power of varying such as are
carried by 'wine'; various sexual associations from its appear-
ance and the Romaunt of the Roos; and notions of race, dignity,
and fine clothes as if from the Wars of the Roses. These two
words never get in each other's way; it is hard to believe they are
pronounced the same. Homonyms with less powerful systems
of association, like the verb 'rows' and the 'roes' of fishes, lend
themselves easily to puns and seem in some degree attracted
towards the two more powerful systems; but to insist that the
first two are the same sound, to pass suddenly from one to the
other, destroys both of them, and leaves a sort of bewilderment
in the mind. 1
 
On the other hand, there was a poem about strawberries in
Punch a year or two ago, which I caught myself liking because of
 
1 What you normally get from a likeness of sound is an added force to
the Paget effect (p. 14) in cases where there is a clear group of words with
similar sound and meaning (e.g. skate, skid, skee, scrape). But this makes
you feel the meaning of the one word more vividly, not confuSe it with the
meanings of the others. On the other hand, it might be arguyjd that a controlled
partial confusion of this sort is the only real point of using alliteration and
rhyme.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 65
 
a subdued pun ; here what was suggested was a powerful word,
what was meant was a mere grammatical convenience :
 
Queenlily June with a rose in her hair
Moves to her prime with a langorous air.
What in her kingdom's most comely ? By far
Strawberries, strawberries, strawberries are.
 
I was puzzled to know why the first line seemed beautiful till I
found I was reading Queenlily as * Queen Lily/ which in a child's
poetry-book style is charming; 'the lily with a rose in her hair/
used of a ripening virgin and hence of early summer, in which
the absolute banality of roses and lilies is employed as it were
heraldically, as a symbol intended not to be visualised but at once
interpreted, is a fine Gongorism, and the alternative adverb sets
the whole thing in motion by its insistence on the verb. It is
curious how if you think of the word only as an adverb all this
playful dignity, indeed the whole rhythm of the line, ebbs away
into complacence and monotony.
 
It is a little unfair, perhaps, to use Chaucer for my purpose;
I have used him because it is important if true that these effects
are somehow part of the character of the language, since they
were so much in evidence so early, and in a writer apparently so
derivative from the French and Italian literatures, which don't
seem ambiguous in the same way. I admit it is much easier to
muddle one's readers when using the unfamiliar stresses of four-
teenth-century speech, and when dealing with unfamiliar uses of
words. This, for instance, I thought at first was an ambiguity,
when Troilus' sickness, caused by love of Criseyde, and used to
arrange a meeting with her, is announced to the assembled
company :
 
Compleyned eke Eleyne of his sycknesse
So feithfully, that pitee was to here,
And every wight gan waxen for accesse
A leech anon, and seyde, * in this manere
Men curen folk; this charm I wol yow lere.'
But there sat oon, al list hir nought to teche.
That thoughte, beste coude I yet been his leche.
 
(ii. 1576.)
 
t
 
Access in the fourteenth century meant some kind of feverish
attack, and I believe is not used in any other sense by Chaucer;
 
 
 
 
 
66 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
but it was used by Wyclif to mean the act of coming near, or the
right of coming hear, and acquired later the meaning of accession
to an office of dignity. So that it might mean that everybody said
they knew how to cure fevers so as to seem dignified at the party,
so as to put themselves forward, and perhaps so as to be allowed
to visit the prince on his sick-bed. The break of the line which
separates accesse from leech and connects it with gan helps this
overtone of ironical meaning, which is just what the social
comedy of the passage requires ; and if you wish to stress the
influence of Chaucer as a stylist, it is these later meanings, and
not the medical meaning, which were most prominent by the
sixteenth century ; this, for instance, is just the suggestive way
Shakespeare would use a Latinised word. But to Chaucer at any
rate, I believe, the joke was strong enough to stand by itself, and
too pointed to call up overtones ; I have put it in to show a case
where a plausible ambiguity may be unprofitable, and the sort
of reasons that may make one refuse to accept it.
 
Rather a pretty example turns up when Criseyde is reflecting
it would be unwise to fall in love (ii. 752). I am, she says,
 
Right yong, and stand unteyed in lusty lese
Withouten jalousye or swich debaat.
 
Lese, among the absurd variety of its meaning, includes lies, a
snare for rabbits, a quantity of thread, a net, a noose, a whip-lash,
and the thong holding hunting dogs; one would take with these
lusty in the sense of amorous. Or lese may mean a contract giving
lands or tenements for life, a term of years, or at will (hence
guaranteed permanence and safety), open pasture-land (as in
leas), picking fruit, the act of coursing (she is her own mistress),
or a set of three (the symbol of companionship as opposed to
passion) ; one would take with these lusty in the sense of hearty
and delightful, its more usual meaning at the time. Thus, while
the intended meaning is not in doubt, to be in lusty lese may be
part of the condition of being unteyed or of being teyed. I have
put down most of the meanings for fun ; the only ones I feel sure
of are : ' I am not entangled in the net of desire/ and * I am dis-
entangled like a colt in a meadow'; these are quite enough for
the ambiguity of syntax. w
 
You may say that these meanings should be permuted to con-
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 67
 
vey doubt : ' I am sprawling without foothold in the net of desire/
and ( I have not been turned out to grass in the wide meadow of
freedom.' But in paraphrasing these meanings I have had to
look for an idiom that will hide the main fact of the situation,
that she is unteyed. Or you might say that stand attracts in, so
that lese must be taken only with unteyed. But withouten suggests
a parallel with unteyed, which would make lese go with teyed. It
would have been consistent enough with Criseyde's character to
have been expressing doubt, but about this line, whatever its
meaning, there is a sort of complacency and decision which
convince me it is only of the second type.
 
At the same time, I admit that this is a monstrously clotted
piece of language ; not at all, for instance, a thing it would be
wise to imitate, and it would be unfair to leave Chaucer without
reminding the reader of something more beautiful. It is during
the scene, then, leading to the actual seduction of Criseyde, when
she has no doubt what she wants but is determined to behave
like a lady, when Troilus is swooning about the place, always in
despair, and Pandarus sees no immediate prospect of pushing
them into bed together, that this sheer song of ironical happiness
pours forth from the lips of their creator.
 
But now pray God to quenchen al this sorwe.
So hope I that he shall, for he best may.
For I have seen of a full misty morwe
Folwe ful ofte a merie somer's day,
And after winter folweth grene May.
Men sen alday, and reden eke in stories,
That after sharpe shoures ben victories.
 
It is the open and easy grandeur, moving with the whole earth,
of the middle lines, that made me quote them; my immediate
point is shoures. It meant charge, or onslaught of battle, or pang,
such as Troilus' fainting-fits, or the pains of childbirth ; if you
take it as showers of rain (i. iv. 251), the two metaphors, from
man and the sky, melt into each other ; there is another connec-
tion with warriors, in that the word is used for showers of arrows ;
there is another connection with lovers in that it is used for
showers of tears.
 
I hope I have made out a fair case for a poetical use of ambig-
uity, in one form or another, as already in full swing in the English
 
 
 
68 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
of Chaucer; so that it has some claim to be considered native to
the language. I really do not know what importance it has in
other European languages ; the practice of looking for it rapidly
leads to hallucinations, as you can train yourself always to hear
a clock ticking : and my impression is that while it is frequent in
French and Italian, the subsidiary meanings are nearly always
bad idiom, so that the inhabitants of those countries would have
too much conscience to attend to them. At any rate it is not true,
obviously enough, that Chaucer's ambiguities are copied from
Boccaccio; I found it very exciting to go through my list in a
parallel text and see how, even where great sections of the stuff
were being translated directly, there would be a small patch of
invention at the point I had marked down. 1 n
 
I shall now stop beating about the Chaucerian bushes, and
pursue my thesis into the very sanctuary of rationality. During
the eighteenth century English poets were trying to be honest,
straightforward, sensible, grammatical and plain ; thus it is now
my business to outwit these poor wretches, and to applaud them
for qualities in their writings which they would have been horri-
fied to discover. It is not surprising that this should be possible ;
'what oft was thought* has a merely delusive simplicity, and
' what were ne'er so well expressed ' as in a compact antithesis are
these shifts and blurred aggregates of thought by which men come
to a practical decision. Sometimes they would have called what
I call an ambiguity a grace, sometimes a generalisation. How
far their ambiguities are typical of their age and method, how
fundamental for understanding their verse, it would be more
difficult to decide.
 
What murdered Wentworth, and what exiled Hyde,
By kings protected, and to kings allied?
What but their wish indulged in courts to shine,
And power too great to keep, or to resign ?
 
(JOHNSON, The Vanity of Human Wishes.)
 
Allied may mean ' connected with by marriage,' or * of a similar
species to,' so that they were royal, or * allied by treaty to' in their
intrigues. Wentworth and Hyde may have wished merely to
shine, to shine in courts, to shine indulged by king and fcourtiers,
 
Ck
 
1 I do not know that any critic has either refuted or defended this treat-
ment of Chaucer. I still believe in it myself.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 69
 
or to shine indulged by king and courtiers in courts \ or they may
have indulged their own wish to shine, or to shine in courts; or
there may be a separate general reflection, putting commas after
wish and courts, that the wish to shine is after all usually indulged
in courts, usually, that is, thought a harmless absurdity and
perhaps helped out by one's neighbours, or (a very different idea)
usually recklessly indulged in by oneself. Not all these give very
different senses, but they are all different ways of reading the
line aloud, and the two meanings of indulged carry some wealth
of reflection and variety of feeling, in particular scorn, sympathy,
respect, and a sort of naturalist's sense that it was all pre-
determined.
 
* In the fourth line power may be parallel to wish, or one of its
objects; their downfall may have been caused by power of a
certain kind, or a wish of a certain kind for power. Power, in the
first case, which people felt was too great for a single favourite,
so that it aroused resentment, or was too difficult, as a matter of
calculation, to use rightly; and which could not be resigned
because it was too tempting to keep it, or because the king would
not let them go, or because, though they might try not to be in-
volved in intrigues, they found themselves so important that any
action, however apparently negative, became a hint and was
construed as intriguing, or because, even if they resigned their
power with the king, they would still have power through what
had now become a false reputation of influence, or simply because
they would now feel too responsible, when something was going
on, not to take a hand. Their wish, in the second case (which
respects them less and makes them less aware of their difficulties)
was to get so much power that it was too great, for reasons such as
those listed above; or to get power so great that they could
resign (wish . . . to resign . . . power) with plenty of money, or a
sense of security, or a sense that vanity was now satisfied, and
power having been now gained and displayed need not further
be used ; or simply, taking the last clause as a separate case, their
fall came when they became afraid of their power and wanted to
get rid of it, and made efforts to resign which, entangled as they
were, could only excite suspicion. However little these later
meanings are intended to be considered by the reader, the line,
I think, conveys by its knotted complexity, by the sense that
 
 
 
70 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
there are grammatical depths the casual reader has not plumbed,
some such ideas of fatal involution as these I have been ela-
borating.
 
These couplets are a triumph for Johnson, but they are the
by-product of a failure to achieve, rather than the reward for
achieving, the compactness and polish he desired. The slighter
ambiguity which is normal to the heroic couplet is of a different
sort, and we must dip back into the first type to fish it up.
 
It is odd to consider that what is a double meaning x in one
language is often only a compactness of phrasing in another; that
in the sophisticated tongues of many savage tribes you cannot
say : ' Bring me my gun, the dogs, and three beaters ' using the
same verb, and the same inflexion of it, for three such different
actions without being laughed at as a man who has made a bad
pun. It is the part of a civilised language to be simplified in
structure and generalised in its notions; of a civilised people to
keep their linguistic rules and know what they are about; but
this must not blind us to the nature of such phrases as
 
There thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes council take, and sometimes tea.
 
(POPE, Rape of the Lock.)
 
where the effect of limited comprehensiveness, of a unity in
variety mirrored from the real world, is obtained by putting to-
gether two of the innumerable meanings of the word take.
 
To rest, the cushion and soft dean invite,
Who never mentions hell to ears polite,
 
(POPE, Moral Essays, iv.)
 
depends on an even slighter, but still genuine enough, ambiguity
of the verb.
 
This way of suggesting grasp of mind, ingenuity, and control
over things, this use of a word with several extended meanings
so as to contract several sentences into one, is the fundamental
device of the Augustan style. The word is usually a verb pre-
cisely because the process is conceived as an activity, as a work
 
1 In the first edition I put ' ambiguity * not double meaning, ^>ut this no
doubt extends the term ambiguity confusingly. Effect worth calling
ambiguous occur when the possible alternative meanings of word or grammar
are used to give alternative meanings to the sentence.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 71
 
of the digesting and controlling mind. The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, for instance, is one enormous panorama of
these little witticisms.
 
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.
 
As such a star re, the Magi led to view
 
The manger cradled infant, God below ;
By vertue 's beams by fame derived from you
 
May apt soules, and the worst may, vertue know.
 
Tfce first may means ' may be expected to,' the second c can if they
choose.' This is the sort of construction Pope would have
handled well; Donne does it very clumsily. Notice, however,
that the second by may either be parallel to the first, so that the
beams of virtue are its fame, or may be subordinate to it so as to
show how the beams of virtue came to be distributed. This, and
the two uses of vertue, corresponding to the two conceptions of
it as an attribute of, or personified in, the Countess of Hunting-
don, give some weight of thought to an otherwise clumsy
construction.
 
Your (or you) vertue two vast uses serves,
It ransomes one sex, and one Court preserves.
 
'Your virtue serves two uses'; or 'you, being virtue itself, serve
two uses ' ; or ' you serve (the cause of) virtue two uses.' Donne's
unfortunate address to the Countess of Bedford may serve to
remind us that the eighteenth-century ambiguity was essentially
easy and colloquial; it was concerned to exploit, as from a
rational and sensible mental state, the normal resources of the
spoken language.
 
Its possible grace and slightness may be shown by a fine detail
from the Rape of the Lock. When Belinda wins at cards
 
The nymph, exulting, fills with shouts the sky;
The walks, the woods, and long canals reply.
Oh thoughtless mortals, ever blind to fate,
100 soon dejected, and too soon elate,
Sudfien these honours shall be snatched away,
And cursed for ever this victorious day.
 
 
 
72 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Reply may be transitive or intransitive. It is the poet who makes
these classical reflections, but, as far as the grammar is concerned,
the speaker may as well be the environs of Hampton Court,
accustomed as they are to the fall of favourites and the brevity
of human glory.
 
Such a use of the verb may be insisted upon by prepositions
or adverbs placed where the different meanings are wanted; this
needs no illustration, and my example is intended chiefly to show
in how small a compass these typical devices may be employee!.
 
Oh, if to dance all night, and dress all day,
Charmed the small pox, or chased old age away,
Who would not scorn what housewives cares produce,
Or who would learn one earthly thing of use ?
 
(Essay on Women.}
 
Here charmed at first means * fascinated/ so as to make it sit still
and do no harm, as one would do to snakes or one's husband;
and then, because chased insists on the activity of this process,
and because away is in a prominent position at the end of the
line, charmed takes on a new meaning as charmed away, ' removed
entirely even when it had already arrived,' no doubt by some
apparently unreasonable incantation, as one does warts. It is
these slight variations of suggestion, I think, that give vivacity
to the line.
 
In the same way, the lyrical outburst of good sense that follows
on from this plays continually on the border-line between the
first and second types of ambiguity.
 
But, since, alas, frail beauty must decay,
 
This insists it is reasonable by being a tautology: 'in so far as
beauty is frail it is exposed to decay'; but frail from its setting
also carries a suggestion of moral as well as physical fragility,
which continues to haunt the verses.
 
Curled, or uncurled, since locks will turn to grey.
 
Locks may have been curled by art (or uncurled for that matter),
or have been, to start with, (naturally) curled; so that we have
now three ways of dividing up women chaste-susceptible, from
the first line ; beautiful-ugly, if uncurled hair is out of fashion, and
artificial-natural, from the second. Will turn to grey is in part a
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 73
 
simple and inexorable future tense, the statement of Nature or
the poet, and in part the metre makes it a statenr^nt of the lady;
'It will turn to grey, the nasty stuff, I caitt stop it.'
 
Since, painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
 
Artificial-natural, with its associate susceptible-chaste, is now
strengthened against beautiful-ugly as the distinction in question,
but not left in possession of the field ; painted might be applied
to* 'meads' in Pope's dialect, and had not quite lost the sense of
'coloured from whatever cause.'
 
The verb is now only future, as the place of the ambiguous
will at the place of emphasis has been taken by all. Both these
changes help the crescendo.
 
And she who scorns a man must die a maid.
 
The wave as it breaks returns to tautology, from which the
original beautiful-ugly criterion seems to have faded out. It may
combine artificial-natural with wanton-chaste; 'modesty and
virtue are no security, because if you don't make the most of
yourself you won't get a husband ' ; or may oppose them to one
another; 'artificiality and virtue are no security, because if you
think yourself too fine for any of the available men you won't
get a husband either.' The tautology chiefly breaks down in its
tenses, and thus implies that ' you may not want a husband now,
whether because you are too humble or too fanciful, too chaste
or too gay, but in the end, every woman must admit it was what
she needed.' In this roundabout way, by not defining the rela-
tion between two criteria and leaving a loophole in a tautology,
Pope arrives, as did Chaucer in flat sentences, at what may indeed
be the fundamental commonplace of poetry, a statement of the
limitations of the human situation. ' Seeing then the inherent
crudity of all possible earthly happiness, considering the humility
of those demands which can alone hope to be satisfied . . .'
 
What then remains, but well our power to use,
And keep good humour still, whate'er we lose?
 
Well may^mean 'thoroughly' or 'with moderation,' and thus
implies a sort jf humility and good humour in deciding which of
them is best in any particular situation. Still may mean that we
 
 
 
74 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
must always keep our balance, always be prepared to laugh at the
absurdity of thte world and our own nature, or keep it still may
mean that we must be careful not to laugh too publicly, to give
ourselves away by not insisting on our dignity or our rights. 1
Reviewing, finally, the three sets of opposites, we may lose beauty,
refinement, or virginity, the lover we had desired, the privacy
we had built up, or the husband it would have been wise to
obtain.
 
It is interesting to find Dryden using the sort of ambiguity *6f
syntax we have considered in the Shakespeare Sonnets, which, on
the whole, is not encouraged by the couplet :
 
And what to Guiscard is already done,
Or to be done, is doom'd by thy Decree,
That if not executed first by thee,
Shall on my Person be perform 'd by me.
 
Or to be done conveys 'is to be done to Guiscard/ or 'is doomed
to be done by thy decree/ going with the phrase before or after;
Sigismond's broken tones of horror are not unheard, though
subdued to the firm coherence of her language, and though
actually conveyed by its unusually intense logical interconnection.
All the Chaucer ambiguities I have used, by the way, were com-
posed by that poet in the intervals while he was writing out of his
own head, and had abandoned Boccaccio for the moment, so this
is our first opportunity of comparing a translator's ambiguity
with the original :
 
Per cio che io t'accerto che quello che di Guiscardo fatto avrai o
farai, se di me non fai il simigliante, le mie mani medesime il
faranno.
 
No one, of course, would expect the ambiguity to be in the
Boccaccio, but it is worth quoting to show that Dryden was
following it as closely as he could, so that perhaps his effect was
forced upon him by the genius or the weakness of English, and
you may say that he would have been at pains to alter it if it had
been pointed out to him. This may be true, but I am sure he
would have felt it was a pity.
 
1 The idea that the rival idiom * keep still ' pokes up, I nowfthink, was a
folly on my part. It would suggest ' Keep good humour t from acting/ and
Pope would not intend to contradict himself flatly in a moral sentiment.
But still (' even then ') does, I think, enrich itself a little with the idea ' calm.'
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 75
 
And again :
 
Sometimes 'tis grateful to the rich, to tfy
A short vicissitude, and fit of Poverty:
A savoury dish, a homely treat,
Where all is plain, where all is neat,
Without the stately spacious Room,
The Persian Carpet, or the Tyrian Loom,
Clear up the cloudy foreheads of the Great.
 
"She third line either goes backwards, as 'what the rich try,'
or forwards, as 'what clears up their foreheads/ The fifth line
either goes backwards, as 'outside/ so that the man is remember-
ing his Room which is quite near, and has just come outside for
a picnic, or as ' without assistance from ' so that only the reader
is thinking of it ; or goes forwards, as ' at a time when they cannot
clear up/ or 'even admitting that these stronger things cannot
clear up.' If both lines three and five go backwards, 'which*
must be understood before clear up. All this gives the last line
at once an extra emphasis and a curiously accidental air, and gives
one a vague impression that it is an Alexandrine. 1
 
Again, this is a translation; it seems likely that Dryden in his
original writing was anxious to keep English syntax out of its
natural condition of ambiguity and squalor, but when he was
translating there were too many other things to think of, and he
slipped back into the loose forms of syntax to which his instru-
ment was accustomed. I shall quote the lines from which these
are expanded; perhaps some ambiguity arises from the effort to
put as much stress on the final verb as possible, in imitation of
the original :
 
Plerumque gratae divitibus vices
Mundaeque parvo sub lare pauperum
Cenae, sine aulaeis et ostro,
Sollicitam explicuere frontem.
 
(HORACE, Odes, in. 29.)
 
The heroic couplet is rich in a peculiar ambiguity of syntax of
the second type, which gives fluidity of thought and several
superimposed rhythms, and may partly explain why this metre
 
is not as monotonous as it has so often been said to be. For
 
 
 
1 This interpretation does not work for the printed text, because the
punctuation gives one clear syntax. But it would be hard to read the verse
aloud so that a listener was not tempted into the other syntax.
 
 
 
76 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
instance, at the climax of Absalom and Achitophel, David breaks
 
silence with <>
 
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.
 
Sway'd y dissembVd y delayed may each be either verb or par-
ticiple independently. Granting that at least one must be a verb,
there are seven rhythms in all, seven sets of evidence for deciding
exactly how strongly David is feeling, how harshly he is likely to
punish. Sway'd, if verb, gives, ' I have ruled the country by
merciful means'; if participle, 'my natural mercy has induced
me either to delay or to dissemble, or both/ You notice the two
following lines, by making a sentence and a clause parallel to one
another, increase the plausibility of mixing up the two gram-
matical forms ; the use of this in the third and fourth lines them-
selves is to give finality to the fourth, while yet making it parallel
to the third. For the variety of possible feeling in the first two
lines (this method of making overtones cancel is here being used
to give a judicial, non-partisan air to the speaker without detract-
ing from his majesty), consider first sway'd as the only main verb
so that the second line is merely jaunty, and then delayed as the
only main verb so that the couplet advances with a terrible con-
tinence to its revenge.
 
The heroic couplet in any case depends very much on par-
ticiples for its compactness, so that an opportunity for this device
often turns up. It is most often used in a subdued form, as in the
following example, where the second half of the antithesis is
given finality by a faint ambiguity of sense, and this is supported
by an ambiguous participle.
 
But true Nobility is of the Mind ;
 
Not given by Chance, and not to Chance resigned.
 
(DRYDEN.)
 
Resigned may convey 'not given back when adverse chance
demands it,' or in a wider sense which really includes both halves
of the line, so as to sum it up, 'kept back from th# control of
chance; unheld by absolute and extra-temporal sources of
strength; not dependent on chance as its fundamental cause/
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 77
 
' It did not resign itself to chance/ taking the participle as active
past tense, gives a sort of resonance to this second meaning, as if
the thing had been settled once and for all, was a plain matter of
previous contract, was a privilege left to us at the Fall of Man.
 
And in Gray's Cat (of so much variety is a linguistic device
capable) the ambiguous participle shows us the creature, in a
thoughtful, complacent mood, folding her paws :
 
Demurest of the tabby kind
The pensive Selina reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
 
Reclined is either participle, heraldically, as in 'couchant/ or verb
so aj> to give a dumpy repose to the verb with the same subject
immediately after.
 
Mr. T. S. Eliot provides a grand example of this trick.
 
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
 
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
 
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
 
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
 
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
 
Doubled the flames of seven-branched candelabra
 
Reflecting light upon the table as
 
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
 
From satin cases poured in rich profusion ;
 
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
 
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes.
 
Unguent, powdered, or liquid troubled, confused
 
And drowned the sense in odours ; stirred by the air
 
That freshened from the window, these ascended
 
In fattening the prolonged candleflames,
 
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
 
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
 
What is poured may be cases, jewels, glitter, or light, and profusion,
enriching its modern meaning with its derivation, is shared, with
a dazzled luxury, between them; so that while some of the jewels
are pouring out light from their cases, others are poured about, as
are their cases, on the dressing-table. If referring to glitter,
poured may, in any case, be a fnain verb as well as a participle.
There is a rHore trivial point of the same kind in the next line,
where glass may*stand alone for a glass bottle or may be paired
with ivory ('vials of glass'); and unstoppered may refer only to
 
 
 
78 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
glass, or to vials and glass, or to vials of glass and of ivory ; till
lurked, which is for a moment taken as the same grammatical
form, attracts it towards perfumes. It is because of this blurring
of the grammar into luxury that the scientific word synthetic is
able to stand out so sharply as a dramatic and lyrical high light.
The ambiguity of syntax in poured is repeated on a grander
scale by
 
Unguent, powdered, or liquid troubled, confused,
 
And drowned the sense in odours ; stirred by the air ... *
 
where, after powdered and the two similar words have acted as
adjectives, it gives a sense of swooning or squinting, or the stirring
of things seen through heat convection currents, to think of
troubled and confused as verbs. They may, indeed, be kept as
participles belonging to perfumes, to suggest the mingling of
vapours against the disorder of the bedroom ; for it is only with
the culminating drowned that we are forced either to accept the
perfumes as subject of a new sentence, or the sense as an isolated
word, perhaps with 'was' understood, and qualified by three
participles. For stirred, after all this, we are in a position to
imagine three subjects as intended by these ; perfumes, sense, and
odours (from which it could follow on without a stop); there is a
curious heightening of the sense of texture from all this dalliance;
a suspension of all need for active decision ; thus ascended is held
back in the same way as either verb or participle in order that no
climax, none of the relief of certainty, may be lacking to the last
and indubitable verb flung.
 
It may be noted that the verse has no variation of sense
throughout these ambiguities, and very little of rhythm; it loses
nothing in definiteness from being the poetry of the English past
participle.
 
Webster was much possessed by death
 
And saw the skull beneath the skin ;
 
And breastless creatures underground
 
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
 
(T. S. ELIOT, Poems.)
 
Leaned, again, may be verb or participle; either 'Webster saw
the skull under the skin and the skeletons under the ground,
which were leaning backwards* (leaned may be #verb with 'that'
understood, as so often in English, but it is hard to distinguish
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 79
 
this case from the participle), or, stressing the semi-colon,
4 Webster saw the skull under the skin, but meanwhile, inde-
pendently of him, and whether seen or no, the creatures under-
ground leaned backward,' both in order to have their laugh out,
and to look upward at the object of their laughter. The verse,
whose point is the knowledge of what is beyond knowledge, is
made much more eerie by this slight doubt.
 
Donne, I suppose, was such another,
Who found no substitute for sense ;
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience,
 
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton ;
No torments possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone.
 
According as lines 3 and 4 go forwards or backwards, there are
two versions of the syntax, corresponding to the two elements of
the paradox in line 4. ' Donne found no substitute for desire and
the world of obvious reality known through the senses, as a means
of investigation, because the habits of the body, or its appre-
hension of reality, have always information still reserved from
one who is experienced in them, and are more profound than any
individual who lives by them is aware.' This is the meaning if
the first verse is a self-contained unit, whether expert refers to
sense or Donne, and line 3 to substitute or expert. Or, taking lines
3 and 4 with the next verse, ' Donne, who was expert beyond the
experience of sense at penetrating, who could form ideas which
sense could not have suggested, knew also those isolated and
fundamental pains, the anguish of the marrow and the ague of the
skeleton, which sense could not have known, and could not allay.'
* Value and a priori knowledge are not known through sense ; and
yet there is no other mode of knowledge. No human contact is
possible to our isolation, and yet human contacts are known to be
of absolute value.' This I take to be the point of the poem, and
it is conveyed by the contradictory ways of taking the grammar.
Of course, you may say the lines are carefully punctuated, so that
the grammar cafi only be taken one way, but in each case it is the
less obvious grammar which is insisted on by the punctuation.
 
 
 
8o SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
However, in finding reasons to admire such effects, one must
remember that 1 the English language makes them difficult to
avoid; here is Andrew Marvell playing exactly the same tricks
without any excuse that I can see.
 
See how the Orient Dew,
 
Shed from the bosom of the Morn
 
Into the blowing Roses
Yet careless of its Mansion new ;
For the clear Region where 'twas born
 
Round in itself encloses :
And in its little Globes Extent,
Frames as it can its native Element.
 
(On a Drop of Dew.)
 
Shed is active verb in the perfect tense, or past participle ; careless
may or may not understand 'is'; /or, etc., conveys 'for the sake
of the upper region where it was born, and to keep up its tradi-
tion, it encloses round in itself,' or c being careless, because the
upper region where it was born is still enclosing it round,'
whether because the drop cannot conceive of being enclosed by
anything else, or because its clear region does in fact enclose the
whole earth ; and in the last line but one may be taken as applying
either to the subordinate clause or to the complete sentence that
follow; and frames, in the closing line, is the only word that is
undoubtedly a main verb following how.
 
Marvell's own Latin version of this, by the way, begins
 
Cernis ut Eoi descendat Gemmula Roris
 
with a complete sentence right away. I don't suppose he was
very proud of the delicious weakness and prolonged hesitation of
his English syntax; but you may say it conveys the delicacy of
the dewdrop, and how sickeningly likely it was to roll off the
petal.
 
I shall now return to Shakespeare and allow myself a couple of
digressions ; about the emendations of his text and his use of a
particular grammatical form.
 
Some readers of this chapter, I should like to believe, will have
shared the excitement with which it was written, will have felt
that it casts a new light on the very nature of language, and must
either be all nonsense or very startling and new. e A glance at an
annotated edition of Shakespeare, however, will be enough to
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 81
 
dispel this generous illusion ; most of what I find to say about
Shakespeare has been copied out of the Arden ifext. I believe,
indeed, that I am using in a different way the material that three
centuries of scholars and critics have collected; without such a
claim it is impertinent to add to the vast library about Shake-
speare; but the difference here is merely one of interpretation.
 
The conservative attitude to ambiguity is curious and no doubt
wise ; it allows a structure of associated meanings to be shown in
a note, but not to be admitted; the reader is encouraged to
swallow the thing by a decent reserve ; it is thought best not to
let him know that he is thinking in such a complicated medium.
So it is assumed, except when a double meaning is very conscious
and almost a joke, that Shakespeare can only have meant one
thing, but that the reader must hold in mind a variety of things
he may have meant, and weight them, in appreciating the poetry,
according to their probabilities. Here as in recent atomic physics
there is a shift in progress, which tends to attach the notion of a
probability to the natural object rather than to the fallibility of
the human mind.
 
Very likely the editors do not seriously believe their assump-
tion; indeed I have myself usually said * either . . .or* when
meaning 'both . . . and.' But the tone of the convention is well
shown by the following note on a passage I have already con-
sidered (p. 1 8). It is with a pretty turn of grammar, such as
might have been included in my seventh type among perversions
of the negative, that the Arden editor insists on the variety of
associations the word rooky had for an Elizabethan audience.
 
This somewhat obscure epithet, however spelt (and it should be
spelt rouky), does NOT mean 'murky* or 'dusky' (Roderick, quoted
by Edward's Canons of Criticism, 1765); NOR 'damp,' 'misty,'
'steamy with exhalations' (Steevens, also Craig); NOR 'misty,'
'gloomy' (Clar. Edd.); NOR 'where its fellows are already as-
sembled' (Mitford), and has NOTHING to do with the dialectic word
'roke' meaning 'mist,' 'steam,' etc. ... the meaning here ... I
THINK, is simply the 'rouking' or perching wood, *.., where the
rook (or crow) perches for the night.
 
Now, o> course, the reason an honest editor puts down the
other possibilities, as well as the one he is tentatively in favour
of himself, is simply that these meanings had seemed plausible
F
 
 
 
82 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
to scholars before; might, for all we know, therefore, have
seemed plausible to anybody in the first-night audience; might
have seemed plausible to Shakespeare himself, since he was no
less sensitive to words than they. There is no doubt how such
a note acts; it makes you bear in mind all the meanings it puts
forward. I cannot now make the imaginative effort of separating
the straightforward meaning of the line from this note ; I feel as
if one was told elsewhere in the text, perhaps by the word
thickens, or by the queer hollow vowels of rooky wood, that the
wood was dark and misty; but rooky, by attraction from crow,
and ignoring the rest of the note, merely suggests ' built over by
rooks; where other rooks are; where this rook will perch/
Since this is the normal experience of readers, we must conclude
either that a great deal has been added to Shakespeare by the
mere concentration upon him of wrong-headed literary attention,
or that his original meaning was of a complexity to which we must
work our way back, and which we may as well acknowledge
without attempting to drape ourselves in a transparent chain of
negatives.
 
Thus, I believe the nineteenth-century editor secretly believed
in a great many of his alternatives at once, and there is no need
for exhortation in the matter. The eighteenth-century editor
had none of this indifferentism; his object was to unmix the
metaphors as quickly as possible, and generally restore the text to
a rational and shipshape condition. We have no longer enough
faith to attempt such a method,* but its achievements must be
regarded with respect, both because it has practically invented
some of Shakespeare's most famous passages and because, in its
more naive forms, it may often show how the word it supplants
came into Shakespeare's mind.
 
Thus, to take one of the famous cruces in Macbeth,
 
My way of life
Is falne into the Scare, the yellow Leafe,
 
is an achievement we must allow no emendation to remove; but
Johnson's May of life seems to me a valuable piece of retro-
spective analysis, because it shows how the poetry was con-
structed ; first, there would be an orderly framewoik of metaphor,
then any enrichment of the notion which kept to the same verbal
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 83
 
framework and was suggested easily by similarity of sound.
Indeed, considering Shakespeare's known- sensibility for puns,
I think Pope's gibe was a sort of opposite of the truth :
 
There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore,
Wished he had blotted for himself before ; (Dunciad.)
 
he had blotted for himself, and Tibbald was bringing back the
first draft.
 
It requires a stronger faith to apply this method to the words
immediately preceding :
 
I am sick at heart . . . this push
 
Will cheere me ever, or dis-eate me now.
 
Emendations are chair and cheer (then pronounced the same);
disseat, disease, disseizes and defeat. Cheer suggests the plaudits
of a victorious army and recovery from melancholia; eate
suggests the hostile army, regarded as an ogre that would eat
him up, and the remorse that was gnawing at his entrails.
 
Now, it seems most unlikely that Shakespeare was less con-
scious of these alternatives than his commentators, and most
unlikely that he would be satisfied by dis-eate, considered as a
word on its own, and intended to mean the opposite of eating.
You may say, then, in defiance of Heminge and Condell, that the
present text shows the printer baffled by successive corrections,
from one to another of the emendations you fancy ; or you may
say that Shakespeare actually intended, by putting down some-
thing a little removed from any of the approximate homonyms,
to set the reader groping about their network. One must con-
sider, before dismissing this second idea as absurd, that the
Elizabethans minded very little about spelling and punctuation ;
that this must have given them an attitude to the written page
entirely different from ours (the reader must continually have
been left to grope for the right word) ; that from the comparative
slowness, of reading as of speaking, that this entailed, he was
prepared to assimilate words with a completeness which is now
lost; that only our snobbish oddity of spelling imposes on us the
notion thai one mechanical word, to be snapped up by the eye,
must have bewi intended; and that it is Shakespeare's normal
method to use a newish, apparently irrelevant word, which
 
 
 
84 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
spreads the attention thus attracted over a wide map of the ways
in which it may <be justified. Or, thirdly, if we must not suppose
the Child of Nature ever blotted, in the course of pouring im-
mortality in a cramped, trying script on to the page, you may say
that he knew better than to pause and allow his mind to be clotted
with emendations; that he put down dis-eate because it was the
first word he could drag out by the heels out of an intense and
elaborate speech-situation that included all the puns editors have
yet devised for it; that this had at all costs to be swept out of Ris
way to make room for the May of life and its galaxy of puns
(which were evidently going to produce something better) ; and
that it was only by being as ruthless as this that he could bear in
mind the soliloquy as a whole. I am sorry to appear so fantastic,
but I can form no other working notion of what this unique mind
must have been like when in action; and to propose emendations
without having any such notion to correct them by is merely to
hack out of the quarry a small poem of one's own. 1
 
Of the simpler thesis, more capable of being tested, that one
main type of emendation goes back to the poet's (probably
mental) rough draft, the best example I know comes in Measure
for Measure, I. iii. 19:
 
DUKE. We have strict Statutes, and most biting Laws,
(The needful bits and curbes to headstrong weeds)
Which for these fourteen years, we have let slip,
Even like an o'ergrowne Lyon in a Cave
That goes not out to prey.
 
' Tibbald ' emended weeds to * steeds/ also slip to ' sleep.' Here,
if anywhere, one would think, an emendation is justifiable; if
you fix * steeds' firmly in your head the other becomes nonsense.
But it is curious, now that we have a simple straightforward line
and one tidy metaphor, how the rhythm has become a plain
didactic sing-song, how it might all have come out of Promos and
Cassandra, the original version of the story. And what does come
out of Promos and Cassandra, on the same theme, is
 
PROMOS. So that the way is by severity
 
Such wicked weedes even by the rootes to teare. t (ii. 3.)
 
1 Of course, if this is true, the Bard is not to be praised Sfbr the result in
the present case, and the actor ought to choose some intelligible emendation.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 85
 
Thus Shakespeare is likely to have had the image from weeds
lying about in his mind; and if you wish to express contempt of
Lucio, it is certainly better done by calling him a 'fat weed that
roots itself at ease on Lethe wharf than by invoking tjie energy
and beauty, the martial and aristocratic associations, of a stallion.
You may say that Shakespeare, though not the Duke, had both
attitudes towards the wicked in mind, and would have been
prepared to call them 'steeds.* But this element in his judg-
ment is sufficiently expressed by calling them headstrong; it
is Measure for Measure to move from one attitude to the other;
and it is in keeping with the tone of this period of his develop-
ment that he should start with 'steeds' and then change,
with a twinge of disgust, to weeds. Biting, it is pleasant to
see, besides making a sort of pun with bits, expresses both
the effect of a curb on a ' steed ' and the effect of a scythe on a
weed. Or, for that matter, of a ' steed ' on a weed* the Duke
will not mind seeing himself under this character, and there
is usually a certain amount of interaction between such rival
ideas.
 
The issue between slip and 'sleep' is less sharp; but not
different; 'sleep' will apply to bits which are not being used for
curbing 'steeds,' and it might suggest the transition to weeds, but
when 'steeds' has been changed to weeds, slip is better, because
it applies both to ' letting the growing weeds escape one's notice '
(which would have been covered by 'sleep') and to 'letting the
weeds slip out of the closing jaws of the shears'; further, in so
far as it concerns bits (which unlike 'steeds' are retained in the
final version) it will cover 'leaving the reins slack so that the
horse can get the bit between his teeth.' It seems very likely,
then, that Theobald was quite right, though not in the way he
meant; that Shakespeare first thought of some prosy remarks for
the poor Duke in the style of the text he was working from, and
then, feeling this was rather thin, and being reminded of another
image in the text which he had himself used elsewhere, dragged
that in as well by two small emendations, and felt he had cheered
the thing up as much as possible. I don't say the result is
uniquely ood poetry, but when Shakespeare's mind is working
at high pressure we have not the same chance of seeing what it
is doing.
 
 
 
86 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Another example of this that deserves mention occurs in a
Sonnet I have already discussed (p. 54):
 
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will, to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
 
Do what you will is the emendation, making a parallel with Be
where you list, and giving the lines the sing-song, chivalrous, and
detached air of a Sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney. So that this is
very like the preceding example; Sidney had set the fashion
Shakespeare was writing in; he would naturally conceive the
lines as directly rhythmical, after his model, and then improve
them into the larger, more revealing, and grammatically more
fertile scheme which has come down to us.
 
It is amusing to see that in taking this view of eighteenth-
century emendation I am forestalled by Pope :
 
Wondering he gazed : when lo a Sage appears,
By his broad shoulders known, and length of ears.
 
(Dunciad, iii. 27.)
 
Pope supplies for this a tremendous piece of textual criticism in
the notes, * partly by Mr. Theobald,' which moves ears back to
'years,' plumes itself very much on its sagacity, misses the point
about donkeys altogether, and explains ' That Mr. Settle was old
is most certain, but he was (happily) a stranger to the Pillory.'
(Which in any case would only have made his ears shorter.) ' It
is, therefore, amazing that Mr. Curll himself should overlook it.'
But evidently this process is more valuable than Pope thought ;
the emendation would throw a great deal of light on his line, if
any were needed, by insisting on the subdued pun which gives
it its point, its innocent and colloquial ease.
 
This example may make plain, too, that I do not think Shake-
speare necessarily wrote down the emendations I have been
applauding, any more than Pope wrote 'years'; in either case
the simpler version was at the back of the author's mind, and
made part of his reason for finding the line satisfactoty.
 
In talking about Chaucer (p. 63), I said that, iif general, puns
and verbal connections of sound were unimportant and not to be
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 87
 
sought out; and now, you will say, I have been using them to
explain cruces in Shakespeare. Alas, you have touched on a sore
point; this is one of the less reputable aspects of our national
poet.
 
A quibble is to Shakespeare [Johnson could not but confess]
what luminous vapours are to the traveller ; he follows it at all
adventures ; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to en-
gulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his
hiind. ... A quibble was for him the fatal Cleopatra for whom
he lost the world, and was content to lose it.
 
Nor can I hold out against the Doctor, beyond saying that life
ra^ very high in those days, and that he does not seem to have
lost the world so completely after all. It shows lack of decision
and will-power, a feminine pleasure in yielding to the mesmerism
of language, in getting one's way, if at all, by deceit and flattery,
for a poet to be so fearfully susceptible to puns. Many of us
could wish the Bard had been more manly in his literary habits,
and I am afraid the Sitwells are just as bad. 1
 
It might, I think, be possible to relate a poet's attitude to life
with his attitude to words, as apart from what he said with them,
but there would be many other things to be decided first. To
relate a taste for puns with the author's sexual constitution, one
would have to consider what a variety of notions of manliness
have held sway; that curious controversy in which the Lords
Tennyson and Lytton, each with conviction and upon clear
grounds, denied one another's virility; the tears and swoonings
through which that of Troilus was asserted; the later Puritan
notion that it is manly to be indifferent to sexuality ; the vital and
virile rhythm of American music which springs from a hypno-
tised abandonment of self to the exact rhythms of machinery;
the precisely similar extravagant gestures with which the Gany-
medes and the Titans of Michael Angelo express respectively
their yielding and their power.
 
But, perhaps, to say that an interest in puns is not virile is a
divergence from the Doctor's opinion; the eighteenth-century
use of ' quibble ' seems to mean that a pun cannot carry much
 
1 All this majf seem tediously facetious, but the subject of subdued puns is,
I think, puzzling and hard to approach directly.
 
 
 
88 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
feeling, and is a petty (rather than a womanish) pleasure. Some
of the early comedies may justify this, but on the whole it is due
to lack of historical sense ; Johnson had been bored by charades
recited in coffee-houses, and thought the Elizabethan pun was
the same. But Shakespeare's interest in the sound relationships
between words was in no degree detached from his interest in
their total meaning; however he arrived at a word he appre-
hended it, and the grasp of his imagination was such that, having
arrived at a term by a subsidiary quibble, while his attention was
yet giving sufficient weight to the matter mainly in hand, he
could work the elaboration due to the quibble into the total
order. When I said that subdued puns were not the most im-
portant objects of analysis, I meant that very few poets are 'so
sensitive to the sounds of language, that very few poets can afford
so to exploit their sensitivity to the sounds of language, and that
perhaps no other poet has been able to concentrate, on to the
creative act of a moment, such a range of intellectual power.
 
I shall now mount the second of the hobby-horses with which
I am ending off this chapter, and examine the way Shakespeare
uses a combination of 'and' and 'of. 1
 
In so far as it is valuable for a poet to include several rhythms,
grammatical forms, or shades of meaning in a single phrase, those
linguistic forms are likely to be most convenient which insist on
no definite form of connection between words and allow you
simply to pass on from one to the other. Thus the word * and '
will be convenient if you are bringing forward two elements of a
situation, conceived as of the same logical type; consider the
word * and ' in my last sentence ; it could have been ' so that they *
or 'but.' The word 'of will be convenient if the two elements
are related to the situation differently, and stand in some asym-
metrical relation to one another. A mild form of this vague use
of 'of may be shown in a very normal and grammatical passage
by Mr. Eliot :
 
I can sometimes hear
 
Behind a public bar in Lower Thames Street
The pleasant whining of a mandoline.
 
(The Waste Land.)
t
 
Taking the last line as unit, whining is the main noun, and the
other words are draped about it, but reading the whole sentence
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 89
 
with the slight emphasis necessary on the ends of lines, the
grammatical skeleton becomes 'I ... heard ... a ihandoline/ and
whining is almost an adjective like pleasant. If I may destroy
Mr. Eliot's poetry for a moment, and read ' The pleasant, whining
sort of mandoline/ it is evident that mandoline becomes the real
object of hear. Elizabethan verse continually does this ; it com-
bines pomp of syntax with immediacy of statement :
 
What means (the warning of) this trumpet's sound ?
Till, swollen with (cunning of) a self-conceit . . .
 
(Spanish Trag., I. ii. 192, Faust. Prol.)
 
King Lear is more desperate in his variety of uses for the
genitive :
 
Blasts and fogs upon thee.
The untented woundings of a father's curse
Pierce every sense about thee.
 
(Lear, i. iv. 320.)
 
The wounds may be cause or effect of the curse uttered by a
father; independently of this, they may reside in the father or his
child. The curse, indeed, might be uttered against the father by
the child, and certainly the king would have meant this if he had
thought of it. All the meanings arrived at by permuting these
versions make up one single-minded curse] any pains Lear has
felt or is still to feel, any pains Cordelia has felt or is still to feel,
as an effect or cause whether of this curse on Goneril or of his
previous curse on Cordelia, or of Goneril's implied curses on him,
all these give him good reason for cursing Goneril with the same
pains in return ; and if any pains in Goneril are to be cause or
effect of any of these cursings, so much the better, let them pierce
her. These pains are already all that he can foresee from the
cursing of fathers \ they, therefore, mean also 'all the curses that a
father can impose on his child.' l
 
The uses of 'and/ though no less various, are less distinct.
The reader may be forced to give it an extended meaning when
 
1 Critics have objected that verbal ingenuity here is very irrelevant to the
feelings of Lear. Anyway all Shakespearean heroes must be supposed super -
humanly articulate ; but Lear in particular, I think, did enjoy the wealth
and force of Ais language ; it was all he had left, and he felt it had magical
power. However,^ I have cut a sentence which claimed double meanings in
untented ; as the word is put next to wounds it is probably limited to the medical
 
 
 
90 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
it connects two words which are mutually exclusive unless applied
 
in different ways. For example, Othello speaks of
 
the flinty and Steele Cooch of Warre. (i. iii. 231).
 
A soldier's couch is flinty in that he lies on pebbles, steel in that
his weapons are beside him. This satisfies the suggestion that
the adjectives apply in different ways, which is conveyed by their
different forms and by the fact that one of them has a capital ;
both suggest the hardness both of external circumstance and of
the inner man that confronts it (so that the first ' both ' mirrors
the second); and, taking them together as a unit, they are the
flint and steel with which you fire your gun. I hope the reader
will agree with me that the word 'and 5 here is standing for three
different ways of fitting words into a structure.
 
I propose to consider a linguistic form common in Shakespeare's
verse, and typical of his method; '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 in-
tended to qualify both of them. This implies that they are both
early attempts (the result of two casual shots) at saying the same
thing; in fact, the whole unit often takes a singular verb; and
hence their main meaning, it is implied, is a sort of highest com-
mon factor of the two of them. This implies, again, a statement
that they are not prime to one another; thus,
 
were 't to renounce his Baptisme,
All Scales, and Symbols of redeemed sin :
 
(Othello, II. iii. 356.)
 
is a reflection about the character of a symbol; that it depends
on the fixture or sealing down of an association, and is thus
analogous to an act of faith. Similarly,
 
All bond and privilege of Nature breake (Cor., v. iii. 25.)
 
states the two opposite ends of the idea of contract, which is not
such a trivial intellectual feat as it may appear. It is in part this
sort of subsidiary meaning that critics are bearing in mind when
they praise the comprehensiveness of Shakespeare's outlook upon
the world. Bond and privilege here is in effect a single word
which combines two opposite notions; I must refer the reader
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 91
 
to my seventh chapter for a discussion of such words and their
importance to poetry. *
 
And 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 to words.
 
but 'tis not so above ;
 
There, is no shuffling, there the Action lyes
In his true Nature, and we ourselves compelPd
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults
To give in evidence. (Hamlet, in. iii. 63.)
 
You put your hand down the hole, feel at the rat's head and face
(forehead) in an attempt to drag it out, and then (teeth) it bites
back at you. 1 ' God will force us to bring our faults out into the
open, however much we struggle/ A forehead, besides being a
target for blows, is used both for blushing and frowning. ' We
will be ashamed and a little indignant at having to confess such
things.' Teeth, besides being a weapon of offence, are used in
making confessions, and it is a mark of contempt, I suppose for
your weakness, even where you might seem most dangerous, that
you are struck there. 'We must confess all in plain words, or
God will give us the lie in our teeth.' Perhaps, too, the forehead
covers the brain where the fault is planned, while the teeth are
used (whether for talking or biting) in carrying it out, so that
they stand for the will to sin and the act of sin respectively. Or,
making a fair attempt to give of its grammatical meaning, so that
the teeth and forehead are not ours but our faults ' ; ' We shall have
to start giving evidence at the very bottom of our faults, and go
right on up to the top where they are at their most striking and
important.' Teeth are a naked part of the skeleton and the
forehead's bone is near the surface; 'The Last Judgment will
give little or no margin to the flesh; we shall have to go right
down to bedrock in turning up our faults.'
This is all very fanciful and irrelevant, the reader may think.
 
1 Miss M. C. Bradbrook pointed out that forehead chiefly meant impertin-
ence to Shaklspeare ; and teeth no doubt would chiefly suggest the * lie in
your teeth ' situation of challenge. But after this simplification you have
still to interpret the phrase as a syntactical unit ; and it has much the same
effect, I think, whether you put these ideas in or leave them out.
 
 
 
92 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
But what is relevant to these notes of the material for rhetoric,
this poetry by 1 physiological shorthand ? All we are given is two
parts of the body and the Day of Judgment; these have got to be
associated by the imagination of the reader. There is no im-
mediate meaning, and in spite of this there is an impression of
urgency and practicality, and being in the clutches of an omni-
potent ferret. Such an effect must rely, not perhaps on flashes
of fancy in the directions I have indicated; I doubt if such ogcur
in the normal reader; but on a sense that the words themselves,
in such a context, include, as part of the way in which they are
apprehended, the possibility of flashes of fancy in the directions
I have indicated. The words are intended for the stage; they
certainly convey something to an audience ; and there is no time
for them to convey anything more definite than this before the
soliloquy has swept on to another effect of the same kind.
 
In this last example the genitive may be said to have been used
normally, if our faults have been personified so as not to be very
distinguishable from ourselves; at least, it has the same sense for
each of the first two nouns. The following case, though the
sense is plain enough, is more complex. 'The new deputy is
very strict '
 
Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness
 
(Measure for Measure, I. ii. 59.)
 
'or because he thinks it best to show his strength at once, and
make sure of his prestige/ The fault of newness would be simple,
and have for grammar, 'this mistake isn't the deputy's fault, it's
Newness's fault.' The glimpse of newness would be fairly simple ;
' He is dazzled with the brightness of his position, and still self-
conscious, with a suggestion of peeping, because of its novelty.'
The first 'of would thus mean 'belonging to,' the second,
'caused by.' But to impose one on top of the other puts the
reader at some distance from either meaning; makes fault convey
a meaning of 'discontinuity' (the sense 'gap' which led to the
geological use) so as to be more like glimpse, glimpse suggest
'spying' and a wilful blindness so as to be more like/awft, and
leaves various ways of making them both grammar floating about
in one's mind; 'this isn't the deputy's fault, it'^the fault of his
glimpse of newness'; or separating 'the* fault from the rest of
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 93
 
the phrase, ' This is original sin coming out, as it often does when
a man changes his circumstances.* *
 
Shakespeare is fond of this double use of a preposition, which
a reader is not supposed to be sufficiently conscious of to think
witty or precise :
 
To keep her constancy in plight and youth
Outliving beauty's outward . . .
 
(Troilus and Cressida, ill. ii. 173.)
 
Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell
 
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
 
Is spied in populous cities. (Othello, I. i. 76.)
 
* Her constancy to the thing she has plighted in its original state
of vigour'; 'caused by negligence during the night-time.' But
I think there is more in it than this; if the prepositions were
being used in quite distinct senses, one for each word, the effect
would be a conscious one, and irrelevant to the dramatic moments
concerned. Her constancy may be thought of as in a state of
being continually plighted (kept in a pickle of virtue) so long as
she is in a state of mind to keep the original plighting \ so that the
alternative meaning of in does something rather like transforming
a surface integral to a volume integral, and insists on the spirit
rather than the letter. Similarly, in the other example, the fire
may have spread 'by reason* of night as well as of negligence;
because the fire occurred at night, there was nobody about to see
it beginning; or, attaching the two to spied, the fire might be
found because it showed up in the dark, and because there were
then idlers about in the streets to notice it. The most prominent
thing about the line is the gusto and Miltonism with which lago
now releases his accumulated excitement into an act; the am-
biguity gives scale to his rhythms. I know of no case where
Shakespeare has made a flat pun out of a preposition, one mean-
ing to each noun ; I believe that (if done at all seriously) to be a
unique property of the Augustans.
 
In Shakespeare's great parades of associations the attendants
are continually quarrelling among themselves, on the pattern of
 
GLEND. When I was born . . .
 
The heifvens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.
HOTSPUR. O'Jthen the earth shook to see the heavens on fire
 
And not in fear of your nativity. (i Henry IV., in. i. 24.)
 
 
 
94 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Consider with this in mind :
 
i
 
That I did love the Moore, to live with him,
My downeright violence, and storme of Fortunes,
May trumpet to the world. (Othello, i. iii. 249.)
 
It is after the pattern we have considered, except that the adjec-
tive throws a new term into the calculation; it qualifies either
violence or violence and storme, and thus tends to detach violence
from fortunes. On the normal pattern of qualifies both nouns,
but it was Desdemona who was violent, after all (she does not
become young and helpless till she is married), precisely because
she stood up to, answered back, and in part created her Fortune
which was stormy. The Folio's comma, which heightens 'the
civil war in the line by dividing it in two, is usually omitted
by editors, I think wrongly; both rhythm and grammar
should be rocking and tempestuous, in a precise echo to the
meaning.
 
The normal form I am considering, then, is liable to break up
at the join between the first two nouns, which I had claimed
would carry so many implications. But this reaction seldom goes
the whole way; the form itself is so strong that its elements hold
together. It is strongest, evidently, when the two first nouns are
almost synonyms, and in this form, partly because it is such a
satisfactory form of padding, partly because it appeals to the
dictionary interest in words that was so strong in the Eliza-
bethans, Shakespeare uses it very often ; it has been drummed,
therefore, into the ears of his readers till they take it for granted.
 
Within the book and volume of my brain.
 
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper.
 
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind.
 
The pales and forts of reason.
 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
 
The whips and scorns of time.
 
The natural gates and alleys of the body.
 
In these random cases either word gives the sense alone. This
shows a pride in the possession of language such a% appears in
people talking to a specialist on some subject of which they have
a little knowledge ; they make haste to use all the technical terms
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 95
 
they can remember. Such examples as I have noted in Shake-
speare's predecessors are of this form : fc>
 
She sent him letters, which myself perus'd,
Full-fraught with lines and arguments of love,
Preferring him before Don Balthazar.
 
(The Spanish Tragedy, n. i. 86.)
FA. Tell me what is that Lucifer thy lord ?
ME. Archregent and commander of all spirits.
 
(Faustus, i. iii.)
 
I cut my arm, and with my proper blood
Assure my soul to be great Lucifer's,
Chief lord and regent of perpetual night. (i. v.)
 
But the form is rare before Shakespeare, and even in Shakespeare
before Hamlet] it is not likely to be sought for by an author
unless he wants to hold a thought in the reader's mind while he
plays round its implications, unless, in fact, he feels it is likely
to be useful in the way I am describing. Consider
 
But we are old, and on our quickest decrees
Th' inaudible, and noiseless foot of time
Steals, ere we can effect them.
 
(All's Well, v. iii. 40.)
 
These two adjectives might seem to be used as synonyms, from
a dictionary interest only, with no stress on their difference. The
first is from Latin (external and generalised), the second, native
(with immediate gusto and a sense of textures) ; in English this
difference is often fruitful ; but here it is overshadowed by nega-
tion and they take effect as the same sort of word.
 
And yet, rather as two forces almost in the same line may have
a small resultant in quite another direction, so the slight differ-
ence between the meanings of inaudible and noiseless points
towards curious places, and is accepted as evidence of the fan-
tastic broodings of melancholy. ' Not only can nobody hear the
foot of time, but it actually never makes a sound; even when
safely alone, like a clock in an empty room, even at its head-
quarters, it is silent; you might be hearing in a different way
sounds outside the human range, and yet this all-important
reality, this^devouring giant, would make no sound.' Certainly
this implication is very far in the background, but I think it was
because Shakespeare was ready to use such differences that he
 
 
 
96 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
was ready to use two contiguous synonyms. The earlier, more
naive dictionary interest (Hear, oh ye kings; give ear, oh ye
princes) has a different purpose; it does not repeat the two
words together, it uses them as an excuse to repeat the rhythm
of a whole phrase. 1
 
Shakespeare's fondness for such pairs of words is fundamental
to his method, and in particular is the cause of the form I am
considering. It is because he so often put down two almost
synonymous nouns that it became natural to add a qualifying
noun so as to connect them; it is because, when he used this
form, he so often made the first two nouns act as synonyms, that
it comes by habit to be so strong a unit in his reader's mind.
Since, however, the two words are here adjectives and not nouns,
this example serves another purpose ; it shows the normal form
grown so strong as to be able to tear two synonyms apart and
make them different parts of speech. For the Folio's comma
makes the inaudible in some degree a noun, as a Miltonism for
destiny, and the part of Saxon to its Latin is then played by
foot or time.
 
Apart from making the two first words synonyms, the strongest
way to hold them together would be to make them an oxymoron,
with the first acting as adjective to the second.
 
*J In the dead wast and middle of the night.
 
(Hamlet, I. ii. 198.)
 
Wast seems to be a pun on ' waste,' * waist,' and ' vast ' ; if * waist,'
it has a strong common factor with middle; if 'vast,' the connec-
tion could be that the night seems longest when you are in the
middle of it; if 'waste,' the connection is that people are about
at the two ends of a night, but the middle is a desolate region put
to no good. If I say that any of these connections in itself con-
stitutes an oxymoron, I am making philosophical assumptions
such as I would wish to avoid, but they are easily treated as such
in paraphrasing 'in the dead and wasted middle of the night.'
Or one may make 'dead* a noun like the other two ('in the dead
 
1 I should have mentioned the legal habit of putting synonyms one after
another in a document in case the other man claims a difference later. The
historical reason why these stock pairs are so often Norman *.nd Saxon is
not because it's pretty but to make sure that both groups understood. I
have an idea that Mr. George Rylands was the first to point this out (in
Words and Poetry).
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 97
 
of night '), or the idea may be ' during one of those periods of the
night which seem vast and yet are only a small part of the middle
of it/ so that 'dead waste* or 'dead vast* can be separated from
night and made to stand alone. The pun on 'waist* is not so
much a meaning as a force holding together wast and middle; it
may perhaps personify the night as one of the terrible women of
destiny. The difference between Shakespeare's and Milton's
use of a phrase like 'the dead vast' is simply that Shakespeare
always gave it an alternative, more usual construction to fall
back on.
 
As a rule, these two forces of oxymoron and tautology are both
operative in attaching the first noun to the second and the third;
but they do not attach it as closely to either as the second is
attached to the third, and it has some life on its own. I shall list
a few examples showing the action of the resulting ambiguity.
 
HOR. In what particular thought to work, I know not:
But in the grosse and scope of my Opinion,
This boades some strange erruption to our State.
 
(Hamlet, I. i. 68.)
 
'Taking it as a whole' (in the gross), 'judging from the whole
unanalysed lump in my mind, as fully as my coarse powers allow'
(in the gross of my opinion), and ' expressing only a personal and
limited view' (in the scope of my opinion).
Hamlet does the same in prose :
 
... to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure.
 
(Hamkt, ill. ii. 26.)
 
The age is apparently the same as the body of the time, but the
normal form pairs it with body, so as to carry a sense of ' condition
of body,' for instance, how old it is. I quote this mainly to show
the group being referred to in the singular.
 
The two nouns may achieve their variety in unity by giving
two different metaphors for the same idea. Thus, ' If we put all
our eggs in one basket . . .'
 
. . . therein should we read
The very Bottome, and the soule of Hope,
The very list, the very utmost Bound
Of all our fortunes. (i Henry IV. , IV. i. 50.)
 
G
 
 
 
98 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
This is obviously a case of dictionary interest, which uses the
display of synonyms as an excuse for repeating the rhythm of a
whole phrase. This fact, and the capitals, tend to make Bottome
separate from soule of Hope, but, on the other hand, the fact that
very is only left out before soul makes the line seem one phrase.
Soule here may be a pun on 'sole, 1 'our one hope is being risked,'
or it may mean ' the very essence of hope/ or, stressing the verb,
'we would be looking into the eyes of Hope, having its true
character brought home to us'; whereas Bottome either means
'the nadir of our fortunes/ taking it as apart from Hope, or just
' all the hope we have in stock ' ; we see the bottom of the tub of
Hope, as if it was so much treacle.
 
Doubt as to the interpretation of a metaphor may be common
to both words, without sharing its alternatives between them, and
still will attach itself to this ambiguity of the normal form :
 
Tell her my love, more noble than the world
Prizes not quantitie of dirtie lands,
The parts that fortune hath bestowed on her :
Tell her, I hold as giddily as Fortune :
But 'tis that miracle, and Queen of lems
That nature pranks her in, attracts my soule,
 
(Twelfth Night, n. iv. 80.)
 
Fortune might be said to have bestowed on her her looks as well
as her estate, so it is not clear whether the miracle is her soule or
her body. It is true that the Folio punctuation, by firmly con-
necting parts with lands, makes parts unlikely to include beauty,
and so gem unlikely to mean soule ; but arguments from punctua-
tion are doubtful, and the final phrase attracts my soule gives
the nineteenth-century editors some excuse for their more
spiritual interpretation. The Duke's rather dismally self-centred
condition gives no help either; he is in the mood to make a high-
toned remark about admiring the soul, and also in the mood to
say it is essential for his soul to have things about it that it likes
the look of; or (putting it more generously) he is including her
character and her looks in a single act of admiration. Thus he is
a fair case for ambiguity.
 
There is also the doubt normal to this form as \o whether
nature pranks her in a miracle or in a miracle of gem$, and whether
either of these is the same as a queen of gems. These independent
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 99
 
doubts are easily connected. To take miracle alone is more like a
catalogue of compliments, to take miracle witA queen is more
cumbrous and excited; has to be said with a hushed and naive
air because the two words are so much heavier and stronger than
the word gems which is to connect them. Thus, the first shows
detachment and admiration, the second, reverence and humility;
a distinction which is perhaps the meaning of, rather than similar
to, that between beauty and character. Or you can make miracle
ancl miracle of gems correspond to her beauty, queen of gems to
her character.
 
The ambiguities of this form may convey a variety of feelings
on the subject in hand. Poor Bertram, in this example, has been
beMen down into civility and a readiness to marry when he is
told:
 
When I consider
 
What great creation, and what dole of honour
Flies where you bid it ... (All's Well, n. iii. 170.)
 
What creation of honour is courtly and reserved, but standing
alone, as the intervening 'what' may suggest, creation becomes
more abject, and means 'you make and break people according
to your liking.' On the other hand, taking great creation and dole
together, and feeling for a connection, one passes from the idea
of * doling out* to the idea of 'doleful'; 'how terribly the sort
of honour you give people weighs them down ' ; he is overheard,
as it were, muttering under his breath.
 
Or the subsidiary meaning may act as pure dramatic irony,
without the knowledge of the speaker.
 
Or that perswasion could but this convince me,
That my integritie and truth to you,
Might be affronted with the match and waight
Of such a winnowed purity in love :
 
(Troilus and Cressida, m. ii. 176.)
 
Affronted may mean 'confronted' (it never does elsewhere);
match may refer to pairing things and seeing that they are equal ;
waight may convey equal strength, adequate solidity, and perhaps
capacity for waiting. Or affronted may mean 'offended/ with a
suggestion of battles; match may refer to single combats and to
the matches which convey flames (the word, of course, is older
than Lucifer matches, and applied in particular to touching off
 
 
 
ioo SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
guns); waight may remember his long waiting for her in Chau-
cer's version ; and his love is to be winnowed by adversity. It is
not quite true to say this is meant as unconscious; as the com-
batants in this play use sexual metaphors for fighting, so the
lovers (more naturally) use terms of war; of this, no doubt, they
are aware, but there is a painful irony as to the interpretation :
 
TRO. I am as true as truth's simplicity
And simpler than the infancy of truth.
 
'In that I'll war with you,' replies Cressida; and, indeed, she
defeats him.
 
'The (noun) and (noun) of (noun)' has kept its head above
water in a variety of difficult circumstances ; we may take a last
look at it being submerged by collision with a stronger form.
 
My vouch against you, and my place i* th* state
Will so your accusation overweigh,
That you shall stifle in your own report,
And smell of calumnie.
 
(Measure for Measure, II. iv. 155.)
 
Report and smell of calumny is the familiar form ; the first two
nouns Latin and Saxon respectively; of with a fair variety of
meaning. 'You will stifle in the calumnious report you have
yourself set about, in the social situation of accusation and self-
righteousness you have yourself caused.' But this model collides,
owing to the short half-line, with another model that makes smell
a verb ; there is no great difference of meaning, except that the
new version is rather less rude to her; to 'smell of calumny'
might happen to any one, and does not seem so deserved a fate
as that of stifling in one's own smelL
 
Praise of the victorious model will add dignity to the old one.
This short half-line is used to repeat briefly, with a calming or
clinching effect, what has been said elaborately in several lines
before. 'While determined, I do not wish to nag; I will stop
talking now on the understanding that I have made my point
sufficiently clear.' It should use less abstract and elaborate, more
earthly and immediate terms, with an air of comradely appeal to
the good sense of the person addressed. * I suppose I ,can come
down to your level now that I have asserted myself ; f what I mean
is quite simple really, I can say it in four words.' There should
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 101
 
be an implication that he has poured out into language the energy
of his judgment, and can now put it finally (having found out in
the course of talking just what it implies) on the last wave of his
desire for expression. 'In short . . .'
 
But cruel are the Times, when we are Traitors
And do not know ourselves ; when we hold Rumour
From what we feare, yet know not what we feare,
But float upon a wilde and violent Sea
Each way, and move. (Macbeth, iv. ii. 18.)
 
It is as a variety of this model that the last word (which so
many commentators have wished to alter) may be justified. He
h^s described, as one living through such a time, its blind agita-
tion 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, re-
membered 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.
 
 
 
Ill
 
AJ ambiguity of the third type, considered as a verbal matter,
occurs when two ideas, which are connected only by being
both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simul-
taneously. This is often done by reference to derivation; thus
Delilah is
 
That specious monster, my accomplished snare.
 
The notes say: Specious, 'beautiful and deceitful'; monster,
' something unnatural and something striking shown as a sign*of
disaster'; accomplished, * skilled in the arts of blandishment and
successful in undoing her husband.' The point here is the sharp-
ness of distinction between the two meanings, of which the
reader is forced to be aware; they are two pieces of information,
two parts of the narrative ; if ingenuity had not used an accident,
they would have required two words.
 
The meanings of a pun of the third type may, of course, be
'connected* in this sense, that their being put into one word
produces an additional effect ; thus here they are used to concen-
trate feeling upon the single line in the speech, focussed in this
way to hold all Samson's hatred, when he expresses his grievances
against her. Indeed, if the pun is producing no additional effect
it has no function and is of no interest; and you may say that, in
so far as an ambiguity is justified, it is moved upwards or down-
wards on my scale out of the third type. If this were true, the
type would gain in theoretical importance but contain no ex-
amples of interest to the reader of poetry. But I think it is not
true, because the matter is complicated by questions of conscious-
ness, of the direction of the reader's attention, of the interaction
between separated parts of his mind, and of the means by which
a pun can be justified to him. To begin with, I should call it an
ambiguity of this type when one is mainly conscious of the pun,
not of its consequences. There may be an additional meaning,
given because two meanings have been fitted into ene word,
which takes effect only when the reader is attend*" ng, not to it,
but to the fact that they have been fitted into one word, so that
 
102
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 103
 
one could call it a deduction from the fact that they have been
fitted into one word.
 
Ye, who appointed stand,
Do as you have in charge, and briefly touch
What we propound, and loud that all may hear. '
 
(Paradise Lost, vi. 565.)
 
It is a bitter and controlled mood of irony in which Satan gives
this address to his gunners; so much above mere ingenuity that
the puns seem almost like a generalisation. But here, as for
ironical puns in general, to be put into the state of mind intended
you must concentrate your attention on the ingenuity; on the
way the words are being interpreted both by the gunners them-
selves and by the angels who have not yet heard of artillery; on
the fact that they are puns. I want to insist that the question is
not here of ' consciousness ' of a device as a whole, but of con-
sciousness of a particular part of it ; for one must continually feel
doubtful about antitheses involving the idea of 'unconscious,'
which, like the infinities of mathematics, may be a convenient
fiction or a product of definition. In literary matters it covers a
variety of antitheses, as between taste and analysis, and seeing
or not seeing the consequences of a proposition ; here I mean by
the conscious part of the effect the most interesting part, the part
to which it is most natural to direct your attention. In this sense,
clear or wide distinction between the two meanings concerned is
likely to place the ambiguity at the focus of consciousness;
threaten to use it as a showpiece to which poetry and relevance
may be sacrificed; make it more obvious to the reader, more
dependent on being overtly observed, and less intimately an ex-
pression of sensibility. Thus its most definite examples are likely
to be found, in increasing order of self-consciousness, among the
seventeenth-century mystics who stress the conscious will, the
eighteenth-century stylists who stress rationality, clarity, and
satire, and the harmless nineteenth-century punsters who stress
decent above-board fun.
 
A pun may be justified to the reader, so long as its two parts
have not strong associations of their own and do not suggest
different modes of judgment, by saying two things, both of which
were relevant and expected, or by saying what is expected in two
ways which, though different, are seen at once to come to the
 
 
 
io 4 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
same thing. In such cases the pun requires no extraneous
apology and wiK receive no particular attention. Or it may name
two very different things, two ways of judging a situation, for
instance, which the reader has already been brought to see are
relevant, has already been prepared to hold together in his mind;
their clash in a single word will mirror the tension of the whole
situation. The pun may then be noticed as a crucial point, but
it will not separate itself from its setting, and will be justified by
that. The puns I am considering now, indeed most puns tliat
are ordinarily recognised as such, fall between these two classes,
they demand an attention which is not absorbed into the attention
demanded by the rest of the poem, and are a separate ornament
on their own. If, then, the reader is not to think them irrelevknt
and therefore trivial, they require some kind of justification.
 
The most obvious way to justify them is by derivation, with
an air of learning and command of language. The puns from
Milton I have just quoted acquire their dignity in this way ; when
a reader can see no similarity between the notions concerned, such
as a derivation is likely to imply, the pun seems more trivial and
to proceed from a less serious apprehension of the word's mean-
ing. The stock case is Milton's line about Elijah's ravens :
 
Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought.
 
(Paradise Regained, ii. 269.)
 
This is ridiculous, but if it had been justified by derivation, as
perhaps it claims to be, it would have been all right; the meaning
would be * though, as every one admits, so that their name itself
implies it, this required a serious miracle.' And as a develop-
ment from this, a pun may be all right if one is induced to give
a pseudo-belief, like that in personification, to the derivation ; as
in MarvelPs delightful line about the tawny mowers. ' And now
when the work is done . . .'
 
And now the careless victors play
Dancing the triumphs of the hay.
 
(Upon Appleton House.)
 
The ornamental comparison with an army, and the anthropo-
logical forces (John Barleycorn and so forth) from r which the
comparison draws its strength, make one delighted with hay, and
therefore willing to justify it by a belief that the dance and the
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 105
 
crop are connected by derivation ; a belief which may have been
shared by Marvell, but which the New English Dictionary does
not encourage.
 
If a pun is too completely justified by its derivation, however,
it ceases to be an example of the third type, at any rate from the
point of view of verbal ingenuity. One must distinguish between
puns which draw some excuse from their derivation and the use
of technical words outside their own field.
 
When thou, poor Excommunicate
From all the joys of love, shalt see
The full reward and glorious fate
Which my strong faith shall purchase me,
Then curse thine own inconstancy.
 
(CAREW, To his Inconstant Mistress.)
 
Excommunicate is on the verge of being a pun, but all that is done
is to use its actual meaning so as to bring in other modes of judg-
ment; if it conveys an ambiguity of the third type, it is not by a
pun but by an ornamental comparison such as I shall consider in
a moment. This use of technical words was one of the central
devices of seventeenth-century poetry; it is usually a matter of
generalising the idea, or, contrariwise, of taking an unusual par-
ticular case. Thus the process is much the same as that which
developed the two meanings of a word from its derivation : but
in the case of the puns from Milton, for instance, the intervening
steps have been lost; the two meanings are not thought of as
proceeding from a single sense; one's knowledge that they have
the same origin is a secondary matter; and in the English
language they are puns.
 
Or a pun may not need to be justified by derivation because
the word itself suggests the connection by which it is justified.
Thus, in Marvell's Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and
Created Pleasure, the Soul says to Music
 
Had I but any time to lose
 
On thee I would it all dispose.
 
Cease Tempter ! None can chain a mind
 
Whom this sweet Chordage cannot bind.
 
It is exquisitely pointed, especially in that most cords are
weaker than chains, so that the statement is paradox, and these
chords are impalpable, so that it is hyperbole. But it is not a pure
 
 
 
ioo OJDVUIM iirno v^r AIVIDHJT ui i i
 
pun (it is, by the way, justified by derivation) because the mind
has not to jump the intervening distance; there is a conceit,
implied by the word itself, upon the strings of musical instru-
ments, which keeps one from any just irritation (in that ' this is
the wrong way for a poet to be thinking about words') at having
to jump at random and too far.
 
It is partly this tact which makes Marvell's puns charming and
not detached from his poetry; partly something more impalp-
able, 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 in-
stance, 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.
 
The change, however, was not sharp; I must include, to
contradict what I have just said, a curious ambiguity from
Dryden, which seems to show quite the Shakespearean innocence
as to the means by which a total effect is being obtained. From
the Death of Amyntas :
 
but soon he found
 
The Welkin pitched with sullen Clouds around,
An Eastern Wind, and Dew upon the ground.
 
In the resounding intensity of Dryden's brief and clear state-
ments of detail, in this Roman use of language, one would not
look for a sensuous richness of meaning. But pitched means both
'blackened as with pitch by the thunderclouds' and 'pitched like
a tent,' so that the Welkin seems at once muffled and to have come
lower; perhaps even the two meanings act upon one another,
and the material of the tent has been tarred and blackened in a
forlorn attempt to keep out the rain. The effect i? not 'rich,'
because even here, where the word has two meanmgs, Dryden is
using both with a sort of starkness, and they are both drawn
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 107
 
sharply from the practical world. But it seems to me a remark-
able case, because it is a full-blown pun, such as the Restoration
poets would normally have been aware of, and made, if they had
used it, into an ambiguity frankly of the third type, and yet the
reader seems meant to absorb it without realising it is there.
Dryden uses the same turn of phrase elsewhere, and again it is
a pun:
 
O call that Night again ;
 
Pitch her with all her Darkness round ; then set me
In some far Desert, hemm'd with Mountain Wolves
To howl about me : (Rivd Ladies> n {)
 
(she*is the Night). He thought, I suppose, of the phrase 'pitch
round,' meaning 'plant round and blacken,' not as a pun, nor as
intended to be analysed, but as an ' idiom,' like the French idioms
involving words like 'jeu.' The attempt then in progress to
make English 'regular,' like French, gives Dryden, I think, other
puzzling ambiguities of this sort. He seems to claim only to be
saying one thing, even when one does not know which of two
things he is saying. Polyphemus thinks Galatea
 
More turbulent than is the rising flood,
And the praised peacock is not half so proud.
 
'The peacock which is commonly praised for its dignity,' or 'the
peacock when it has just been praised'? It is merely a direct
translation of laudato pavone superbior\ but the doubt feels larger
in English than in Latin.
 
I shall now list four eighteenth-century puns, in order of in-
creasing self-consciousness*.
 
Let such raise palaces, and manors buy,
Collect a tax, or farm a lottery ;
With warbling eunuchs fill a licensed stage,
And lull to servitude a thoughtless age.
 
(JOHNSON, London.)
 
Licensed refers, I understand, to the passing of the Licensing
Act, and a<Jds with a peculiarly energetic sneer that they had all
kinds of goings-on. This, I take it, is a joke, one would say it
with an accent on licensed and look knowingly at the listener to
 
 
 
108 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
make sure he saw the point. You may say this is only the use of
a technical word in a generalised sense, but it is not a metaphor;
the two meanings are different and he means to say both of them.
 
Most manfully besiege the patron's gate,
And, oft repulsed, as oft attack the great,
With painful art, and application warm,
And take at last some little place by storm.
 
( YOUNG, Love of Fame, Satire in.)
 
Place is hardly more than an ambiguity by vagueness ; it is only
because the ornamental comparison is between such different
activities (one * poetical,' the other prosaic and considered sordid)
that the political and military meanings of the word seem differ-
ent enough to be funny.
 
The watchful guests still hint the last offence,
The daughter's petulance, the son's expense;
Improve his heady rage with treacherous skill,
And mould his passions till they make his will.
 
(JOHNSON, The Vanity of Human Wishes.)
 
This is a careful, very conscious pun, which had to be dovetailed
into its setting; but still it does not stand out from its setting and
seem the point of it; the pun is thought of as of the same kind
as the other devices employed. Consider the word heady, which
means both that he was head of the family and that his passions
soon came to a head ; it is the same sort of pun as the conscious
one about the will, and yet one can absorb it without recognising
it at all.
 
Where Bentley late tempestuous wont to sport
In troubled waters, but now sleeps in port.
 
(POPE, Dunciad, iv.)
 
The pun is sustained into an allegory by the rest of the couplet;
tempestuous and sport are satirical in much the same way as the
last word. But here, I grant, we have a simply funny pun; its
parts are united by derivation indeed, but too accidentally to give
dignity; it jumps out of its setting, yapping, and bites the Master
in the ankles.
 
The eighteenth-century use of a pun is always worldly; to
join together so smartly a business and a philosophical notion, a
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 109
 
nautical and a gastronomical notion, with an air of having them
in watertight compartments in your own mind (each such subject
tias its rules which save a man from making himself ridiculous,
md you have learnt them), so that it seems to you very odd and
igile to have jumped from one to the other all this belongs to
the light-weight tattling figure (it is odd it should have been
Doctor Johnson's), very ready to form a group and laugh at a
man in the street, or to 'smoke' Sir Roger de Coverley in the
theatre ; the man quick to catch the tone of his company, who
knows the talk of the town. In each case, too, the pun is used as
the climax of a comparison between the subject of the poem,
something worldly, and a stock poetical subject with which
:he Writer is less intimately acquainted, which excites feelings
simpler and more universal. Wit is employed because the
3oet is faced with a subject which it is difficult to conceive
Doetically.
 
The nineteenth-century punster is quite another thing; to
3egin with he is not rude ; I suppose he came in with the Christ-
nas Annuals, and supplied something which could be shown to
ill the daughters of the house, which all the daughters of the
louse could see (at a glance, without further information) was
rery whimsical and clever. Apart from this it is difficult to see I
vhy a man like Hood, who wrote with energy when he was
oused, should have produced so much verse of a trivial and un-
lirected verbal ingenuity; trivial, not because fitting together
phrases wholly separate, drawn from everyday life, or lacking in
heir own emotional content, but because, so far from * being
nterested in mere words,' he uses puns to back away from the
echoes and implications of words, to distract your attention by
nsisting on his ingenuity so that you can escape from sinking into
.he meaning. It is partly, perhaps, a result of the eighteenth-
:entury contempt for ' quibbles ' (so that the verbal acrobat must
>e desperately unassuming) and partly a result of profound
changes in the attitude to life of the Duke of Wellington's Eng-
and ; of a nervous Puritanism which had had quite enough of
mrest and the Romantic Revival, and felt, if the girls must read
 
t
 
1 Mr. Edmund Blunden rebuked me by pointing out that Hood had to
;rind away at the *stuff to make a living ; so the only problem is why his
ublic wanted it.
 
 
 
no SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
verse, let us see they get something that cannot possibly go to
 
their heads.
 
Not a trout can I see in the place,
 
Not a grayling or rud worth the mention,
 
And though at my hook
 
With attention I look
1 can ne'er see a hook with a tench on.
 
At a brandling once gudgeon would gape,
But they seem upon different terms now ;
 
Have they taken advice
 
Of the Council of Nice
And rejected their Diet of Worms now ?
 
For an eel I have learnt how to try
By a method of Walton's own showing,
 
But a fisherman feels
 
Little prospect of eels
On a path that's devoted to towing.
 
Such virtuosity cannot be despised ; I have warmed to admira-
tion in copying it out. But the nervous jumping of the style, the
air of feeling that all feeling (ahem) is a little better avoided, gives
a sort of airlessness to the humour. One feels a sort of sym-
pathetic embarrassment about the relation it implies to his public ;
there may, at any moment, be an anxious hush because just for
once dear Mr. Hood is not, perhaps, in perfect taste, and at the
end there must be a sigh of relief because he has avoided the
pitfalls of his subject very skilfully. A verse of his 'serious'
poetry seems symptomatic :
 
And blessed will the lover be
 
That walks beneath their light,
And breathes the love against thy cheek
 
/ dare not even write.
 
But such puns are a sound poetical training; given a subject so
accepted that even the punster can afford to show feeling, given
an occasion where he can indulge at once his reader^' snobbery
and his own humanity, how delicately the instilment can be
used.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY in
 
How frail is our uncertain breath !
 
The laundress seems full hale, but deatj^
 
Shall her * last linen * bring ;
 
The groom will die, like all his kind;
 
And even the stable-boy will find
 
This life no stable thing.
 
Cook, butler, Susan, Jonathan,
The girl that scours the pot and pan,
And those that tend the steeds,
All, all shall have another sort
Of service after this in short
The one the parson reads.
 
One or, perhaps, two puns are sufficient for a verse ; notice the
fourth line, from which Shakespeare would have extracted a pun
on 'kine/ but which here mentions the groom merely to lead up
to the stable-boy. Each verse moves about its pun as an axis, and
yet the result is so lyrical and strong that one wonders if it can
really be a matter of punning; whether the same effect could
not be conveyed without an overt pun at all.
 
Thou needst not, mistress cook, be told
The meat to-morrow will be cold
That now is fresh and hot :
Ev'n thus our flesh will, by and by,
Be cold as stone; Cook, thou must die,
There's death within the pot.
 
I don't know what his readers thought of this brave piece of
writing; I wish only to point out that, though of the same form
as the verses that moved round puns, it has not got any; the two
associations of flesh take their place. Associations of this kind,
used in the same way as puns are used, are an important exten-
sion of the third type, and occur more often than puns themselves.
I must now consider their action.
 
An ambiguity of the third type, then, as a matter concerning
wlioie states of mind, occurs when what is said is valid in, refers
to, several different topics, several universes of discourse, several
modes of judgment or of feeling. One might call this a general
ambiguity qf the third type; it includes, for instance, the eight-
eenth-century puns I have just considered. Now, there are two
main ways of constructing such an ambiguity. It may make a
 
 
 
ii2 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
single statement and imply various situations to which it is
relevant; thus I should call it an ambiguity of this type when an
allegory is felt to have many levels of interpretation ; or it may
describe two situations and leave the reader to infer various
things which can be said about both of them; thus I should call
it an ambiguity of this type when an ornamental comparison is
not merely using one thing to illustrate another, but is interested
in two things at once, and is making them illustrate one another
mutually.
 
There is a variety of the * conflict* theory of poetry which says
that a poet must always be concerned with some difference of
opinion or habit between different parts of his community;
different social classes, ways of life, or modes of thought; that
he must be several sorts of men at once, and reconcile his tribe
in his own person. It is especially to generalised ambiguity of
the third type that this rather limited formula will apply.
 
In the following full-blown ornamental comparison men and
bees are the two social types, with each of which the poet must
be in sympathy.
 
for so work the honey-bees . . .
They have a king, and officers of sorts ; . . .
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds ;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home,
To the tent-royal of their emperor ;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold ;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
 
(Henry V., i. ii. 320.)
 
and so forth. The commentators have no grounds for deciding
from this passage, of course, whether Shakespeare knew much or
little about bees : we can only see what effects he was producing
by a distorted account of their habits. It is a vision of civil order
conceived as natural, made at once charming and convincing by
its expression in terms of creatures so petty and apparently so
irrelevant. The parallel passage in Vergil uses the same methods ;
it pokes fun at bees and their pretensions to humanity, and so,
with a sad and tender generosity, elevates both parties in the
mind of the reader by making a comparison between them. For
matters are so arranged that the only things the reader thinks of
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 113
 
as in common between men and bees are the more tolerable
things about either of them, and since, by the compactness of the
act of comparison, a wide variety of things in which bees and men
are alike have appeared in his mind, he has a vague idea that both
creatures have been adequately described. Both, therefore, are
given something of the charm, the suppression of unpleasing
detail, and the cosiness (how snug they all are down there !) of a
bird's-eye view.
 
I shall only consider the line about masons. 1 Bees are not
forced by law or immediate hunger to act as masons ; ' it all comes
naturally to them'; as in the Golden Age they sing with plenty
and the apparent freedom of their social structure. On the other
harid, bees only sing (indeed, can only sing) through the noise
produced by their working ; though happy they are not idle ; and
the human opposition between the pain of work and the waste
of play has been resolved by the hive into a higher unity, as in
Heaven. Milton's 'the busy hum of men* makes work seem
agreeable by the same comparison in a less overt form.
 
Roofs are what they are building; the culmination of successful
work, the most airy and striking parts of it; also the Gothic
tradition gave a peculiar exaltation to roofs, for instance, those
magnificent hammer-beam affairs which had angels with A^-like
wings on the hammers, as if they were helping in the singing from
a heavenly choir; and to have masons, building a stone roof, with
mortar instead of nails, is at once particularly like the methods of
bees and the most solid and wealthy form of construction. But
bees build downwards from the roof, so that they are always still
building the roof, in a sense ; the phrase is thus particularly ap-
plicable to them, and the comparison with men makes this a
reckless or impossible feat, arguing an ideal security. In the
same way, both parties are given wealth and delicacy because the
yellow of wax is no surface gilding, not even such as in the
temple of Solomon (built without sound of hammer, in the best
bee tradition, though it was) shone thickly coated upon ivory, but
all throughout, as the very substance of their labours, is its own
pale ethereal and delicious gold.
 
-
 
1 G. K. Chesterton had praised this line, I think in one of his detective
stories. He had'*great powers as a verbal critic, shown mainly by incidental
remarks, and I ought to have acknowledged how much I was using them.
H
 
 
 
ii4 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
It is sometimes hard to distinguish these ambiguities from the
corresponding ones of the first type; to distinguish allegories
which are felt to have many levels of interpretation, or compari-
sons of which both parties are the subject, from similes which are
effective from various points of view. 1 (It may, indeed, be too
hard ever to be worth while, but it would still be useful to know
that the distinction existed.) Perhaps it is enough to say that
they are more complicated, or have to be thought of as if they
were. The mind has compartments holding opinions and modes
of judgment which conflict when they come together ; that, in
fact, is why they are separated; compartments, therefore, which
require attention, and one is particularly conscious of anything
that mixes them up. If the two spheres of action of a generalisa-
tion, or the two halves of an ornamental comparison, involve two
such compartments which must be thought of in two ways, we
have the conditions for a general ambiguity of the third type.
 
It is this (in some sense conscious) clash between different
modes of feeling which is the normal source of pleasure in
pastoral; or, at any rate, in so far as pastorals fail to produce it,
one may agree with Johnson and call them a bore.
 
Thou shalt eat crudded cream
 
All the year lasting,
And drink the crystal stream
 
Pleasant in tasting;
Whig and whey whilst thou lust
 
And brambleberries,
Pie-lids and pastry-crust,
 
Pears, plums, and cherries.
 
(ANON., Oxford Book.)
 
The delicacy of versification here (alliteration, balance of rhythm,
and so forth) suggests both the scholar's trained apprehension
and the courtier's experience of luxury; but it is of the bramble-
berry that he is an epicure; the subject forces into contact with
these the direct gusto of a 'swain.' That all these good qualities
should be brought together is a normal part of a good poem;
indeed, it is a main part of the value of a poem, because they are
so hard to bring together in life. But such a case as this is
peculiar, because one is made to think of the different people
 
1 What I was puzzling over here was a more general version of the objection
raised by critics, that a pun is not in itself an ambiguity.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 115
 
separately ; one cannot pretend to oneself that the author is the
rustic he is impersonating; there is an element cf wit in the first
conception of the style. It is a faint and subtle example of the
mutual comparison which elevates both parties.
 
Or the different modes of feeling may simply be laid side by
side so as to produce * poetry by juxtaposition ' ; the last verse of
a poem by Nash (discussed on p. 25) gives a very grand and
dramatic example of this :
 
Haste therefore each degree
To welcome destiny ;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player's stage.
Mount we unto the sky;
I am sick, I must die
 
Lord, have mercy upon us.
 
(Summer's Last Will and Testament.)
 
The first line of the last three gives the arrogant exaltation of
the mystic; it has so total and naive a belief in the Christian
dogma of immortality (a belief, too, in the righteousness of the
assembled company, or the ease with which such righteousness
may be attained) as to convey a sort of pagan hubris and triumph ;
one remembers that it was written for a scene of at once worldly
and ecclesiastical pomp. The second, sweeping this mood aside,
gives the mere terror of the natural man at the weakness of the
body and the approach of death. The third gives the specifically
Christian fusion of these two elements into a humility so pro-
found as to make the hope of personal immortality hardly more
than incidental to a consciousness of the love of God.
 
You may say that this is not in any direct sense ambiguous,
because the elements are isolated statements which succeed one
another flatly; I should reply that it becomes ambiguous by
making the reader assume that the elements are similar and may
be read consecutively, by the way one must attempt to reconcile
them or find each in the other, by the way the successive ideas
act in the mind. Or you may say that the experience they convey
is too strong to be conceived as a series of contrasts ; that one is
able to reconcile the different elements; that one is not conscious
of their difference but only of the grandeur of the imagination
which brought them together. In so far as this is true, the ex-
 
 
 
ii6 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
ample belongs to ray fourth chapter. Or, indeed, you may say
that two opposites the fear of death and the hope of glory are
here stated together so as to produce a sort of contradiction ; and
that the humility of the last line then acts as evasion of the con-
tradiction, which moves it out of the conscious mind into a region
of the judgment which can accept it without reconciling it. In
so far as this is true, the example belongs to my seventh chapter.
But I find myself that I cannot forget the difference, that I read it
aloud 'dramatically/ as a dialogue between three moods. For
this is a very dramatic device indeed, it is a form of dramatic
irony. I should say that the most exciting and painful example
of its use by Shakespeare (in so crude a form) is that scene at the
end of i Henry IV., where Falstaff, Harry Percy, and Prince
Henry (natural gusto, chivalric idealism, and the successful
politician), in a series of lightning changes, force upon the
audience in succession their mutually incompatible views of the
world.
 
I am not sure, then, that this last example is in the right
chapter; it may be enjoyed, as it could be read aloud, in various
ways. The following more limited example is, I think, strictly
of the type in question ; it is the sort of mutual comparison which
affects one as a pun. Sacred and profane love (in a devotional
setting which would consider them very different) are seen as one
for their generosity, just as men and bees have been seen as one
for their orderliness.
 
Lord what is man ? that thou hast overbought
So much a thing of nought ?
 
Love is too kind, I see; and can
Make but a simple merchant man.
'Twas for such sorry merchandise
Bold painters have put out his eyes.
 
(CRASHAW, Caritas Nimia.)
 
In this case, though not always in Crashaw, it seems a matter
of conscious ingenuity and artifice that Cupid and the love of
Christ should so firmly be used to interpret one another; he is
well enough aware that they belong to different worlds, but in the
generosity of his heart it seems very gay and conveys a sort of
reliance on the good-humour of Jesus to treat then as the same,
or to explain one by the other.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 117
 
The following example may serve to show that Mutual Com-
parison can degrade instead of elevating both parties. It is not an
example of Pope's more poetical satire. The mood is simple, and
though the mock-heroic scheme as a whole has a rich imaginative
background the pleasure intended here seems only that due to the
strength and ingenuity of the attack.
 
High on a gorgeous seat that far outshone
Henley's gilt tub, or Fleckno's Irish throne,
Or that where on her Curlls the Public pours
All-bounteous, fragrant grains, and golden showers,
Great Tibbald sat. (Dunciad, ii.)
 
Various different situations of mean, vain, and trivial absurdity
are being concentrated on the hero by comparison. Now, com-
parison has two uses, one to show that one thing has more or less
of some quality than another, the other to show that the two
things are comparable in regard to that quality; an ornamental
comparison concentrates on the second of these, and it is the
second of these that Pope is exploiting. It may be worth quoting
the original Milton :
 
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of 2nd,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat. (Paradise Lost, ii.)
 
The comparison with Milton puts Theobald on a ' bad eminence '
to start with, and then makes him petty and ridiculous because
the eminence is too great. His seat is then said to outshine, and
be similar to, the pillory in which Curll stood, high and lifted up,
and glittering with bad eggs. The word grains is chosen to
match pearl, and mean rotten food in general ; golden showers may
mean that people emptied chamber-pots at him from neighbour-
ing windows. But another world of pettiness and vanity is piled
on to these two ; curl may be a pun meaning one's wig, or the
great structures worn by ladies, since the public is female : and
then the other throne, than which the hero's was far more squalid,
would be the powdering-tub, showers would be hair-oil and grains
powder. Perhaps one is more conscious here of the difference
between the |wo sorts of Curl than of the difference between the
powdering-tub and the pillory; I might, therefore, have used
 
 
 
n8 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
this example among the puns, and it may help to show the
connection between what I have called the special and general
varieties of the same type.
 
The point of the joke here is the contrast between the different
sorts of throne, or rather between the attitudes to life, the social
settings, represented by them. But in these last two examples
the meanings of the symbols are in some degree connected to-
gether; their difference is included within a single act of worship
or of satire.
 
That they may have almost no inherent connection is clear in
the following small example by Scott, which merely happens not
to be a pun.
 
Stop thine ear against the singer ; '
 
From the red gold keep thy finger ;
 
Vacant heart and hand and eye
 
Easy live and quiet die.
 
Marriage and commerce, avarice and desire, with pert decision,
are fitted by Sir Walter into a single image. 1
 
The following complete poem by George Herbert keeps the
symbols apart with the full breadth of the technique of allegory ;
though the contrast in question is the same as that of the Crashaw
example.
 
I gave to Hope a watch of mine : but he
 
An anchor gave to me.
Then an old prayer-book I did present :
 
And he an optick sent.
With that I gave a viall full of tears :
 
But he a few green eares :
Ah, Loyterer! Fie no more, no more Fie bring.
 
I did expect a ring. (HERBERT, The Temple.)
 
One can accept the poem without plunging deeply into its mean-
ing, because of the bump with which the short lines, giving the
flat, poor, surprising answer of reality, break the momentum of
the long hopeful lines in which a new effort has been made; the
movement is so impeccable as to be almost independent of the
meaning of the symbols.
 
And, indeed, the symbols themselves seem almost to be used
in a way familiar to the mathematician; as when a set of letters
 
1 Perhaps the charm of the song comes from a more real Ambiguity ; that
the * moral ' is so much opposed to his temperament and even to his style.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 119
 
may stand for any numbers of a certain sort, and you are not
curious to know which numbers are meant became you are only
interested in the relations between them. One would think that
an indefiniteness of this sort in poetry must, if it is tolerable, be
of the first type, and unlikely to repay study; but George
Herbert, here and elsewhere, has put to extraordinary uses these
dry and detached symbols.
 
To begin with, there is an irony in that he treats only with
Hope, not with the person or thing hoped for; he has no real
contact with his ideal but only with its porter. This bitterness
is common to any interpretation of the symbols.
 
You may regard the poem as chiefly about the soul's irritation
and despondency at the slowness with which it can achieve per-
fect union with God ; so that the watch is the brevity of human
life, and the length of time already spent in waiting (since it
means both these, a symbol of time, not of time considered either
as long or short, was wanted) ; the anchor either the certain hope
of resurrection, or an acquired power of endurance, of holding
on to the little that has already been gained; the prayer-book
prayer and an ordered rule of life ; the optick faith that can look
up to the sky, or the mystical event of a faint illumination (granted
to encourage the mystic) and distant view of Heaven ; the mall
a mark of repentance, or of the pains of desiring perfect union
with God, or the pains of desiring what has been renounced for
him; the green eares faint signs of spiritual growth or mystical
achievement, which carry a distant promise of something better;
and the ring Omega, the perfect figure of Heaven or of eternity,
marriage with God, or a halo. 1 But, even then, this single mean-
 
1 Herbert would not have meant that he himself expected the halo of a
saint, and would have thought it very bad taste in an interpreter to say that
he did. I remember how cross I was when a reviewer of my own verse used
a poem in which I had addressed myself as a twister. He said that this was
a surprising confession and exactly what was the matter with me. I thought
that this showed an almost imbecile incompetence on the part of the critic.
The reason for the clumsiness here is that (as in several other cases) I was
listing beside the possible primary meanings the suggestions at the back of
the mind which would reinforce them. The group of ideas about the marriage
ring and the circle of eternity is strengthened by the idea of the halo ; the
halo is therefore worth listing, though not as a candidate for the primary
meaning. It would seem pedantic to distinguish the two things all the time,
but failure tf do so sometimes makes the analyses look wilder than I intended.
And yet after all, though I want to give full weight to this point of view, I
am not sure th^ft Herbert did not mean the poem dramatically as said by a
foolish character, so that the halo could poke up its head quite prominently.
 
 
 
120 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
ing or subject for the poem contains metaphors, hardly less
important than^itself, either from the earthly state of courtship,
taldng the prayer-book as containing the marriage service and
the ring as a sexual symbol, perhaps only as employed in that
ceremony; or from the life of secular ambition, since the
notion of exchanging presents suggests Court ceremonial and
modes of obtaining preferment, and the ring might be a mark
of office.
 
I am not sure why the prayer-book was old] it was a traditional
and venerable thing, he had himself lived according to its rule,
or wanted to use it in marriage, for a long time; and there may
be a hint at the religious controversies with which the life of
secular ambition was then so closely concerned. But it is also
used to give a sort of humility and reality, something of the con-
viction of steady prose, to this flat and as it were pastoral exchange
of gifts. I have already considered the means by which Shake-
speare makes one accept words imaginatively; the means by
which Herbert makes one accept them soberly, as things rich in
their interpretation rather than in their meaning, is harder to
explain in terms of syntax.
 
The symbols, then, apply to three different situations, and
from this point of view the poem belongs to my third type. But
of an ambiguity of the third type, whether special or general, the
reader needs to be conscious, and it seems possible to read this
poem more simply. It may be read so as to convey, apparently in
terms of the imagined movements of muscles, a statement of the
stages of, a mode of feeling about, any prolonged endeavour; so
that the reader is made to accept them all as alike in these par-
ticulars, and draw for his sympathy on any experience of the kind
he may have had. In so far as the lines really act like this, by
the way, they are much more ' like ' music than are the releasing
effects of open vowels which are usually given that praise. Now,
it is an absurd stretching of the idea of ambiguity to call a gener-
alisation ambiguous because it has several particular cases, and
in so far as the poem is read in this way its ambiguity, at any rate,
lies deep within the obscurity of the first type.
 
That two such different classes should tumble on tpp of one
another may seem an important failure of my system; but, as a
matter of fact, all generalisations act like this. In absorbing
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 121
 
them, one usually thinks of several particular cases and sees if
they are true ; this is so both for deep thoughts about life and for
the propositions of science and mathematics. In so far as a
generalisation is thought of as the aggregate of the particular
cases which have been chosen to test it, it may be called an
ambiguity; in so far as, accepting it, you regard the taking of
particular cases as a use of it rather than as an unpacking of its
meaning, it becomes a single proposition. The difficulty arises
because I am not using the word 'ambiguity' in a logical, but in
a psychological sense; the notion of relevance is necessary to
pick out cases of it, and it is conceived as always conscious in one
mode or another. But in this particular case one may fall back
on a logical distinction, between a class defined by numeration
(' courting the favour of God, of a mistress, and of the King') and
a class defined by a property (' any course of action which involves
prolonged endeavour'); a statement about the first class may be
called an ambiguity, a statement about the second a generalisa-
tion. From a statement about the first, which appears complex,
one infers a statement about the second, which appears simple.
One may say, then, that in ordinary careful reading this poem is
of the third type, but when you know it sufficiently well, and have
accepted it, it becomes an ambiguity of the first or (since it is
verbally ingenious) of the second type.
 
It is usual, of course, for a poet to feel his subject is a good one
because it throws light on matters of another sort, because it
illustrates life, or what not ; such an unexpressed ambiguity is a
very normal feature of good poetry. Often what on a first reading
seems faulty or irrelevant has been put in to insist on this feeling;
that is not to say it is not genuinely faulty, because unnecessary.
Dr. Johnson's objections to Gray's Cat can, I think, only be
answered in this way.
 
Selina, the cat, is called a nymph, with some violence both to
language and sense ; but there is good use made of it when it is
done ; for of the two lines
 
What female heart can gold despise ?
What cat's averse to fish ?
 
the first refc/rs merely to the nymph, and the second only to
the cat.
 
 
 
122 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
The Doctor complains here that the separation is too neat,
which is true enough; but since cat and nymph have been con-
fused in the first part of the verse, it is a relief to the reason (such
as he would have been the first to admit into poetry) that they
should be separated at the end of it. As to the violence done to
language, it is justified by a sort of honesty, because we are meant
to be so conscious of it; that we are asked to make that colloca-
tion is the point of the poem; and Johnson's pretty distinction
between merely and only is unfair, because both nymph and cat
are the main subject.
 
If what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into
the water, and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.
 
Here he complains that they are not sufficiently separated, or
not connected sufficiently verbally. Two logical statements con-
veying the two morals could easily have been constructed, but to
put them logically into one, as a generalisation, would require
a sort of wit different from the sort Gray is using. Certainly it
gives pleasure when there is a sentence applying to two things
separately, by a sort of pun ; but then it gives pleasure in another
way when one has to see that a nonsensical sentence (Johnson
rightly insists that it is nonsense) is conveying a double meaning.
For, of course, the clash is not only between nymph and cat but
between two metaphorical nymphs; between snatching at a
pleasure, real but dangerous (the cat and the less spiritual
nymphs), and mistaking a false love for a true one (the more
spiritual nymphs) believing that happiness to be permanent
which will, in fact, be fleeting. Thus, by the last line of the
poem, gold, which in the earlier line quoted means chiefly
'money' ('women are avaricious'), has come to mean 'of genuine
value' ('what will pay in the long run').
 
This ambiguity enables him to give advice about the pursuit
of happiness with the sort of reality and good sense which belongs
to advice about the pursuit of pleasure ; he assumes a charming
humility in the more spiritual nymphs, and implies that the
happiness which they seek is a genuine one. I am not sure that
pleasure and happiness give the right antithesis, but after all he
was a Christian trained in Pagan literature; he f is playing off
against one another two different notions of love, two different
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 123
 
standards of morality, and it is precisely the achievement of this
which produces the nonsense of which Johnson complains.
 
Johnson's good sense (a quality urgent for literary critics) was,
I think, too harsh in this way only, that he would not allow such
implied comparisons as require to be observed. A comparison,
in his view, must either be overt or such as could be ignored
without making nonsense; this is unreasonable, because it
ignores the way people's minds in fact work; and as long as the
Romantics stuck to this issue they could score points off him.
 
Allegory, which leads you to think of several particular inter-
pretations, is nowadays rare and unpopular; but one must re-
member that, in a form rather different from that of my last
example, it is among the roots of Elizabethan literature, must
have come very easily to the readers of that age, and, however
it may have been abandoned later, was one of their chief impulses
towards greater subtlety of language.
 
Her Majesty fell upon the Reign of Richard //., saying */ am
Richard the second, know ye not that ? ' * Such a wicked imagina-
tion was determined and attempted by a most unkind Gent., the
most adorned creature that ever your majesty made.' 'He that
will forget God will also forget his benefactors ; this tragedy was
played forty times in open streets and houses.'
 
There was always this simple political interest, connecting
Hamlet with James from their treatment of their mothers, for
instance, which must have been a continual danger and annoy-
ance to Shakespeare ; he seems to have evaded its consequences
himself, but he had to pay fines for the mistakes of others, and
was acting in the production of Sejanus at Court after which
Jonson was arrested for Popery and treason. This, though his-
torically important, seems poetically rather trivial, but the book
which may be said to have been the origin of Elizabethan litera-
ture has a more complex and more certainly intended ambiguity.
In the Shepheardes Calendar the same shepherds appear in pre-
cisely the three capacities that are treated of in Herbert's poem,
as lovers, as courtiers, and as divines. And in the Faerie Queene,
by the process I have just considered, this variety of meaning has
been blurred into generalisation, and you can read all kinds of
political and religious interpretations, indeed any interpretations
that come naturally to you, into a story offered as interesting in
 
 
 
124 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
itself, and as giving an abstracted vision of all the conflicts of
 
humanity.
 
You might think that almost any seventeenth-century conceit
could now be included in the third type ; they all play off one
subject against another, and use arguments that do not work
because they are ' on another plane/ But Donne, and the secular
love-poets who follow him, are much too interested in one of the
two worlds contrasted to use the other as more than a weapon.
 
Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?
What sailor's ships have my sighs drowned ?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground ?
When did the heats that my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguey Bill ?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, that quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
 
(The Canonization.)
 
The other ways of viewing the world, in such a case, are brought
in not as things that are also true, but as things once valuable
which no longer seem important; they show him feeding the fire
with all the furniture in the room. This advocate's mood is not
an ambiguous one. Herbert and the devotional poets, on the
other hand, use a conceit to diffuse the interest back on to a whole
body of experience, whose parts are supposed eventually recon-
cilable with one another; and the reader must pause after each
display of wit to allow the various moods in which it could be
read, the various situations to which it could refer, to sink into
his mind. There is a curious contrast between the momentum
obtained by secular, and the stasis obtained by devotional, meta-
physical poets, from the same sort of conceits ; I should explain
this by calling only the second way of using them an ambiguity of
the third type.
 
But this form of ambiguity, though it was prominent in early
Elizabethan writings, was soon felt as a triviality and abandoned
by the dramatic writers. For if you are thinking about several
situations at once you are detached from all of them, and are not
observing any with an immediate intensity. I do nQt say this is
impossible, only unlikely ; indeed, it is the contrast between this
sort of abstraction and the intensity he is conveying in other ways
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 125
 
(the fact that he has overcome this difficulty) which makes the
poetry of George Herbert seem the product of an inner life so
fully unified and of a belief so permanently held.
 
So far I have dealt with the ambiguity of this type which talks
about several things at once ; there is also the ambiguity which
talks about one thing and implies several ways of judging or
feeling about it. This tends to be less rational and self-conscious,
therefore less strictly fitted to the third type ; it is more dramatic
and more aware of the complexities of human judgment. Pope
continually makes use of it; partly because, though himself a
furious partisan (or rather because of it, so as to pretend he is
being fair), he externalises his remarks very completely into state-
ments of fact such as must always admit of two judgments ; partly
because his statements are so compact, and his rhythmic unit so
brief, that he has not always room for an unequivocal expression
of feeling. The word 'equivocal' is a good one here; much of
the force of his satire comes from its pretence of equity. He
stimulates the reader's judgment by leaving an apparently un-
resolved duality in his own 'this is the truth about my poor
friend, and you may laugh if you will.' The now fashionable
attitude to the eighteenth century rather tends to obscure this
point ; it is true the humour of the period is often savage, but that
does not show that the judgments with which it is concerned are
crude.
 
Is Pope sneering or justifying, for instance, in one of the best
known of these spare but widely buttressed constructions ?
 
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.
 
(Epistle to Arbuthnot.)
 
No one can deny that these words ridicule, but: obliged by
hunger: I am not sure that they titter; it is only after you have
been faced with the dignity of human need that you are moved on
to see the grandeur of human vanity. Much recent apologetic
for Pope has contented itself with saying how clever it was of the
little fellow to be so rude ; but to suppose this line means merely
* the man must have been a fool as well as a bore, since he was
 
 
 
126 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
hungry,' is not merely an injustice to Pope's humanity, it is a
failure to understand the tone he adopts towards his readers.
 
Soft were my numbers, who could take offence
When pure description held the place of sense? . . .
Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill.
1 wished the man a dinner, and sat still.
 
(Epistle to Arbuthnot.)
 
Good, sympathetic Mr. Pope, one is to think; he has a profpund
knowledge of human nature. The situation in these two ex-
amples is the same; the first stresses his contempt, the second
his magnanimity ; but in neither can one be sure what proportions
are intended. A more verbal expression for this doubt is giv^n in
the line about the Goddess of Dulness :
 
Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
And solid pudding against empty praise.
 
(Dunciad, 152.)
 
Neither truth nor gold, neither praise nor pudding, are to be
despised, and the pairs may be connected in various ways. A
poet is praised by posterity for attending to what Pope called
truth; whereas gold and pudding are to be gained by flattery.
Gold may be the weights of the balance with which truth is
weighed, so that the poet will tell any lie that he decides will pay;
or all four things may be alike and equally desirable, so that,
though the author is hungry and sensible, he is also truthful and
anxious for his reputation ; his proportion of praise and pudding
has to be worked out with honest care. This spectacle, in its
humble way, is taken to be charming; so that this version is
contemptuous but without the bitterness of the first one. For
these versions, praise is that of good critics, and it is empty beside
pudding in a sense that would sympathise with the poet's hunger,
or as an imagined quotation from him so as to bring him into
contempt. But it might be empty as unjustified, as being the
praise of (that is, from or to) the rich patrons who had bought the
compliments; gold then takes on the suggestion of contempt,
never far from it in Pope's mind, and means 'shoddy poetical
ornament'; pudding is paired with truth, in the natupal order of
the antitheses, and means either the cheap food ivhich is all he
would be able to buy, or the solid reality of his dull but worthy
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 127
 
writings. At any rate, the epithets solid and empty contradict the
antithesis * venal' and 'genuine'; it is gay and ge/ierous of Pope
to have so much sympathy with pudding; and it is this detach-
ment from either judgment in the matter (the truth such men
could tell, the praise they could win, is nothing for Pope to be
excited about) which makes the act of weighing them seem so
absurd.
 
This process of interpretation may evidently be applied to the
feelings a reader imposes on the material; there may be an
interest due to the contrast between the stock response and the
response demanded by the author. I think myself, in the follow-
ing border-line case, that I am describing the attitude of Pope,
but 'such an analysis would have achieved its object if it described
the attitude only of the majority of his readers. It is that descrip-
tion of a great eighteenth-century mansion in which Pope is
apparently concerned only to make its grandeur seem vulgar and
stupid.
 
his building is a town,
 
His pond an ocean, his parterre a down.
 
Who but must laugh, the master when he sees,
 
A puny insect, shuddering at a breeze.
 
My lord advances, with majestic mien,
Smit with the mighty pleasure to be seen.
 
But hark, the chiming clocks to dinner call ;
A hundred footsteps scrape the marble hall :
 
Is this a dinner ? this a genial room ?
No, 'tis a temple, and a hecatomb.
 
(Moral Essays, iv.)
 
All this is great fun; but before concluding that Pope's better
judgment really disapproved of the splendour that he evidently
envied, one must remember the saying that as Augustus found
Rome, so Dryden found English ' brick, and left it marble' ; that
the Augustans minded about architecture and what Augustus
did ; that j great part of the assurance and solidity of their atti-
tude to life depended on solid contemporary evidences of national
glory. When Pope prophesies the destruction of the building his
 
 
 
128 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
language takes on a grandeur which reflects back and trans-
figures it :
 
Another age shall see the golden ear
Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre,
Deep harvest bury all his pride has planned,
And laughing Ceres reassume the land.
 
These lines seem to me to convey what is called an intuitive
intimacy with nature ; one is made to see a cornfield as something
superb and as old as humanity, and breaking down dykes irre-
sistibly, like the sea. But, of course, it embrowns as with further,
more universal, gilding, and nods on the parterre like a duchess;
common things are made dignified by a mutual comparison
which entirely depends on the dignity of Canons. The glory is a
national rather than a personal one; democracy will bury the
oligarch ; but the national glory is now centred in the oligarch ;
and if the whole people has been made great, it is through the
greatness of the Duke of Chandos.
 
This seems to me rather a curious example of the mutual com-
parison which elevates both parties ; in this case, it is the admira-
tion latent in a sneer which becomes available as a source of
energy for these subsidiary uses : and also an example of how the
Wordsworthian feeling for nature can be called forth not by an
isolated and moping interest in nature on her own account, but
by a conception of nature in terms of human politics. I hope, at
any rate, you agree with me that the lines convey this sort of
sympathy intensely; that there is some sense of the immensity
of harvest through a whole country ; that the relief with which
the cripple for a moment identifies himself with something so
strong and generous gives these two couplets an extraordinary
scale.
 
It is not, of course, the normal use of allegory to make a state-
ment which is intended to have several interpretations. The
normal use is to tell a homely story and make clear that it means
something else, something, for instance, religious or political, but
not both ; so that there is only one real meaning, which the first
meaning is frankly a device to convey. 1 The reader does not
 
1 Whether allegory is to be called ambiguous or not, the allegorical method
has to be considered because it can be used for effects whicll are undoubtedly
ambiguous ; thus the problem of definition is again secondary.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 129
 
think of it as ambiguous, but as pretending to be ambiguous,
perhaps to evade some censorship ; and the critic must consider
the consequences of the device before saying whether it is am-
biguous or not. In devotional verse it is often used, like poetry
itself, to impose calm on the writer and allow him to evade his
own habits of reticence; almost all sexual language, too, as in
Gray's Cat, is a hierarchy of devices of this kind. It may be
ambiguous in this sense, that two modes of feeling are implied
abolrt the one matter in hand ; but, for this, allegory is only of
incidental convenience. As an example of its incidental con-
venience, I shall consider a verse of that curious and superb
Pilgrimage of Herbert, which so closely anticipates the Pilgrim's
Progress, and contains both special and general ambiguity of the
third type, both pun, allegory, and variety of feeling.
 
That led me to the wild of Passion, which
 
Some call the wold :
A wasted place, but sometimes rich.
Here I was robbed of all my gold,
Save one good Angel, which a friend had tied
Close to my side.
 
Angel, of course, is a pun on the name of a coin ; wild and wold
seem, as Herbert pronounced them, to have been puns on * willed '
and * would.' The most striking thing about the verse is its tone,
prosaic, arid, without momentum, whose contrast with the feel-
ing and experience conveyed gives a prophetic importance to this
flat writing; there is the same even-voiced understatement in the
language of the Gospels. This is made possible because, in the
apparent story, he adopts the manner of a traveller, long after-
wards, mentioning where he has been and what happened to him,
as if only to pass the time. Several pretty devices carry this out,
particularly in the word good, by which the traveller means, as in
'my good sword/ 'a thoroughly useful piece of gold,' while the
mystic, actually meaning 'holy,' uses it as a distinguishing mark:
' I mean the good angel, not the bad one, of the two that accom-
pany a man.' I Passion, in the apparent story a proper name which
insists on the allegory, has a wide range of meanings, such as an
irritated lack of patience, the loves of the flesh, and the ambitions
 
1 Critics are accustomed to say that the angel was his wife ; this seems to
me a secondary meaning, but it ought to be listed.
 
 
 
130 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
at Court which he had abandoned ; nor is it easy to map out its
underground connections, by opposites, with the Passion of the
Christ. (I am speaking, of course, of its poetical meaning; its
prosaic meaning is not in doubt. 'He was not exempt from
passion and choler/ said his brother, 'being infirmities to which
all our race is subject, but that excepted, without reproach in
his actions/)
 
One must bear these meanings in mind when considering the
third line, which seems to me exceedingly beautiful. It" fits
precisely into the apparent story; the traveller lets drop a com-
ment on the general appearance of the place, before going on to
the incident which made it worth mentioning; and yet in won-
dering what the occasional riches of a wold can be like you find
yourself (after reviewing deserts and oases, Spain's vineyards and
barren rock, and Horace Walpole's remark about Blenheim, that
it was like the castle of an ogre who had desolated the surrounding
country) in the knightly fairyland of Spenser, among vast and
inhuman wildernesses, and the portentous luxury of enchanted
castles. As a statement about Herbert's own life, it sums up with
a pathetic generosity his long and painful process of judgment
on the matter, with an air of saying as much as reticence allowed ;
reading the poem is thus made into a social situation calling for
some tact and delicacy; his readers are agog to see how much
they can deduce from what he lets drop.
 
I am including this example in the third type, because its
methods, allegory and the overt pun, are the most conscious of
all devices to produce ambiguity, and because the mood of the
apparent is so effectively in contrast with the mood of the in-
tended story. But this particular pair is one so normal in ordin-
ary life, the situation itself is so 'strong/ that the various mean-
ings are felt as a coherent unit, and the verse might reasonably
have been placed in the fourth type. Notice, in particular, the
reverse reaction, as the chemists say, obtained by taking Passion
in the liturgical sense, so that the verse is now about the life of
renunciation instead of about the life of ambition. It is still true
that the place was mountainous (full of difficulties), wasted (both
in the sense of 'having wasted its own strength* and 'laid waste
by monsters'), that it was sometimes rewarding, and that going
to it lost him all his gold (no longer in the allegorical sense) except
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 131
 
for one good Angel. That there should be a hint of this alter-
native reading gives an impression, not of doubf, but of pathos
and humility, in that after all his struggles he is only leading one
of the possible good lives. I do not know whether this device
is best produced or appreciated by holding it in the focus of
consciousness ; it is too deeply rooted an ambiguity to be fitted
into the third type.
 
We have thus practically arrived already at the fourth type, in
which the ambiguity is less conscious, because more completely
accepted, or fitted into a larger unit. I shall close this chapter
with some remarks about the transition.
 
It is in the third type of ambiguity, when the two notions of the
ambiguity are most sharply and consciously detached from one
another, that one finds oneself forced to question its value. It
must seem trivial to use one word with an effort when there is
time enough to say two more simply; even if time is short it
seems only twice as useful, in a sort of numerical way. And the
value of the general variety of ambiguity of the third type is no
more obvious; you remember how Proust, at the end of that
great novel, having convinced the reader with the full sophistica-
tion of his genius that he is going to produce an apocalypse,
brings out with pathetic faith, as a fact of absolute value, that
sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of
living in another place, and this, since you are now apparently
living in two places, means that you are outside time, in the only
state of beatitude he can imagine. In any one place (atmosphere,
mental climate) life is intolerable; in any two it is an ecstasy.
Is it the number two, one is forced to speculate, which is of this
encouraging character ? Is to live in n+ 1 places necessarily more
valuable than to live in n ? When there is no connection between
the two halves of an ornamental comparison, the two meanings
of a pun, except that they are both relevant to the matter in hand,
one would think that the comparison can only give trivial pleasure
and the pun not be particularly funny. Thus we return to the
notion I put at the beginning of the chapter, that in so far as an
ambiguity is valuable, it cannot be purely of the third type.
 
I consider that I have shown by examples how an ambiguity
can approach jthe third-type definition, which is perhaps rather
like a limit, and yet remain valuable; I might say, too, that there
 
 
 
132 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
is a sort of formal satisfaction in such a connection between two
ideas, even whefi they are merely both relevant and need not have
been particularly connected. For one is accustomed to such
devices being used to connect things in an illuminating way, and
there is at least the pleasure of expectation in seeing the shell even
when it is empty. Much of the cult of 'style* is a sort of prac-
tising in this way. But, indeed, one can say more boldly that
Proust's belief, as a matter of novel-writing, is very convincing;
that the pleasure in style is continually to be explained by just
such a releasing and knotted duality, where those who have been
wedded in the argument are bedded together in the phrase ; that
one must assume that w-f i is more valuable than n for any but the
most evasively mystical theory of value. Those who adopt this
view are taking refuge in the mysterious idea of an organism, of
all things working together for good ; we shall expect, from this
point of view, to find more important cases of ambiguity when
several ambiguities are put together, when they belong to my
next chapter, and represent a state of mind.
 
 
 
IV
 
L N 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.
 
One is conscious of the most important aspect of a thing, not
the most complicated; the subsidiary complexities, once they
havfe been understood, merely leave an impression in the mind
that they were to such-and-such an effect and they are within
reach if you wish to examine them. I put into the third type
cases where one was intended to be mainly conscious of a verbal
subtlety; in the fourth type the subtlety may be as great, the
pun as distinct, the mixture of modes of judgment as puzzling,
but they are not in the main focus of consciousness because the
stress of the situation absorbs them, and they are felt to be natural
under the circumstances. Of course, different readers apply
their consciousness in different ways, and a line which taken alone
would be of the third type may become of the fourth type in its
setting; but the distinction, I think, is usually clear.
 
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:
And therefore have I slept in your report,
That you yourself being extant well might show,
How far a modern quill doth come too short,
Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow,
This silence for my sin you did impute,
Which shall be most my glory being dumb,
For I impair not beauty being mute,
When others would give life, and bring a tomb.
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes,
Than both your Poets can in praise devise.
 
(Sonnets, Ixxxiii.)
 
Shakespeai is the writer upon whom ingenuity has most often
been misapplied ; and if his syntax appears ambiguous, it may be
 
133
 
 
 
134 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
because the Elizabethan rules of punctuation trusted to the
reader's intelligence and were more interested in rhetoric than
in grammar. One must pause before shadowing with irony this
noble compound of eulogy and apology. But one may notice its
position in the sequence (Shakespeare seems to have been taunted
for his inferiority, and is being abandoned for the rival poet) ; the
mixture of extraordinary claims and bitter humility with which it
is surrounded; and that the two adjacent Sonnets say: 'Thou
truly fair wert truly sympathised In true plain words by' thy
truth-telling friend,' and * You to your beauteous blessings add a
curse, Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.' It
is not true that the feeling must be simple because it is deep;
irony is similar to this kind of lyrical self-abandonment, or fhey
relieve similar situations; by the energy with which such an
adoration springs forward one can measure the objections which
it is overriding, by the sharpness of what is treated as an ecstasy
one may guess that it would otherwise have been pain.
 
Line 2, then, goes both with line i and line 3. Taking it with
line i, Shakespeare was only concerned for the young man's best
interests : ' I did not praise you in verse because I could not see
that your reputation could be set any higher by my praise.' Even
for this, the primary, meaning there are two implications ; either
never * until you told me to praise you,' an order accepted humbly
but with some echo of being fond on praise, or never l until I found
you out ' ; ' At one time I had not yet discovered that your cheeks
needed rouge, and your character whitewash'; 'When I first
loved you I did not realise that you had this simple and touching
desire for flattery.'
 
The first line may also stand alone, as an introduction, with
these meanings, so that line 2 goes with line 3 ; for this version
one would put a comma after therefore-, ' And so, when no paint-
ing had been set to your fairness ' (paint to your cheeks or to a
portrait, praise to your beauty or to your virtue, apology to your
vices), * I found that you exceeded ' (in beauty, in virtue, or in
wildness of life) ; ' And so, judging you simply, not foreseeing the
defences I should have to build up against feeling harshly of you,
it came to me as a shock to know you as you are.' The first
version is much the stronger, both because Ifountf is parallel to
/ never saw and because exceed wants to pass over the comma and
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 135
 
take the fourth line as its object; indeed, I put the second version
down less from conviction than because I canncjt now read the
line without thinking of it. 1
 
For the various senses of line 4 we must first consider the
meaning of tender, which is almost wholly limited into its legal
sense by debt ; * offered payment of what is due.' This is coloured,
however, by * tender regard* (i Henry IV \, v. iv. 49); also the
meaning * person who looks after' may be fancied in the back-
ground. Taking the word as object of exceed, we have : * I found
you were worth more than the normal compliments due from a
poet hired to write eulogies of you,' ' I found that you exceeded
what I could express of beauty in verse,' * I found your tender-
nesfe towards me exceeded the barren tenderness I owed you as
your tame poet,' ' I found that you were more to me than the
person who would see to it that the hired poet wrote adequate
praises.' These assume the poet's debt is a debt owed by a poet.
Taking it as owed to a poet, we have : 1 1 found that you gave me
more than you need have done,' * I found that you treated me
more as a friend than as a hired poet,' and * I found you felt for
me more generously than I felt for you, when I merely looked
after my job and wrote eulogies of you.' I am being verbose here
to show the complexity of the material ; the resultant ideas from
all these permutations are only two : * You were treating me as a
friend, not as a poet,' and * You were more than I could describe.'
Here tender is the object of exceed, but, stressing the comma after
exceed, tender may be either, as a mere echo, a second object of
found, 'I found only the barren tender,' 'You did not treat me
more as a friend than as a poet, so I stopped writing' (or thought
I found is now a more generous doubt), or may be a comment in
apposition to the whole first three lines: 'This was merely my
business ; I thought your beauty and virtue so excessive because
that was the proper thing ; to be expected from a poet in love ; to
be expected from a professional poet trying to win favour at
Court.' Most people in reading the line only recognise the mean-
ing, 'You were more than I could describe,' but they are made
to feel also in the word barren a more dreary and more petty way
 
1 One mijpt, I think, either say that the comma after exceed is a misprint
or that it is intended to attract attention to the word and suggest that W. H.
exceeded in mofe ways than one. But the complexity of feeling is still there
if it is a misprint,
 
 
 
136 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
of feeling about the matter, they know there is some bitterness
 
which this wa\^e of generosity has submerged.
 
Therefore in line 5 seems parallel to therefore in line 2, so that
it could refer to found or saw. Or with a larger rhythm, the fifth
line refers to the whole first quatrain and starts a new one. Alter-
natively, therefore may refer forward to line 6 : c for this reason
... in order that. 1 Report is either what people in general say or
what Shakespeare says, or what Shakespeare writes, about him ;
thus I have slept in your report means either ' I have stopped writing
about you/ or ' I have stopped contradicting rumours about you/ or
 
* I have bolstered up my faith in you by accepting the public's good
opinion of you. ' That means ' in order that ' (you might show well),
 
* the fact that ' (I have slept, which your being extant well shows), or
'for fear that' (your being extant might show how far a modern
quill comes too short). Extant means visible, or successful and
respected, or the subject of scandal. How and what follow show
and speaking respectively, but for variations of grammar which
leave them detached they may be regarded as introducing an
exclamation and a question. The last line of the quatrain evi-
dently refers backwards as its main meaning: 'A modern quill
comes too short when attempting to write of as much worth as
is in you ' ; it can also refer forwards, but in trying to regard it in
this way one is bothered by a modern usage which could take it
alone; 'and, talking of worth, are you worth anything, now,
frankly ? ' This is not an Elizabethan idiom and was certainly not
intended, but its coarseness is hard to keep out of one's mind,
because the version which takes line 8 with line 9 is very similar
to it : 'I was describing all the worth I could find in you without
the effort of flattery, and this amounted to the silences of which
you, being fond on praise, have been complaining.' If you like
you may call this version ridiculous, and hurriedly place a colon
at the end of the second quatrain; but please notice that the line
may still be read as : 'I was afraid that a modern quill might
come short of a high standard of worth in describing all the worth
that it can find in you.'
 
This seems to me a good illustration of the difference between
the third type of ambiguity and the fourth. Shakespeare was
exquisitely conscious of such subsidiary uses of grajnmar and the
jokes that could be made out of bad stops (if example is needed,
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 137
 
consider Quince in Act v., scene i. of the Dream); but I do not
think he was conscious of these alternatives (certainly I do not
think that the reader who is apprehending the result as poetry
should be conscious of these alternatives) in a clear-cut way as if
they were jokes. They do not need to be separated out to give
their curious and harrowing overtone to the quatrain; and once
they have been separated out, they can only be connected with
the mood of the poem if you hold clearly in mind the third
quatfain which is their reconciliation. I might first paraphrase
the second. ' I have not written or talked about you fully, as the
absence, or the particular kind, or the excess of scandal about you
shows; either because your reality was already a sufficient ex-
preSsion of your beauty and virtue, or in order that you might
still make a good show in the eyes of the world, as you might not
if I were to describe you as I now know you, or for fear that the
contrast between you and your description might be bad for the
literary reputation of the Elizabethans, or for fear that the con-
trast between what this time and previous times could produce in
the way of beauty and virtue might be bad for the Elizabethan
reputation as a whole.'
 
It would be possible to regard line 12, which clinches the third
quatrain, as an antithesis: 'When others would bring life, I in
fact bring a tomb.' This might be Shakespeare's tomb\ 'I do
not flatter you but I bring you the devotion of a lifetime.' More
probably it is W. H.'s; 'I do not attempt to flatter you at the
moment; I bring you the sad and reserved gift of an eternal
praise.' We may extract from this some such meaning as : 'I do
not describe your beauty or your faithlessness, but my love for
you.' However, there are two other ways of taking the syntax
which destroy this antithesis: 'When others would bring life,
I, if I wrote about you, would bring a tomb,' and 'When others
would try to write about you, would try to give you life, and
thereby bring you a tomb ' ; for both these the tomb must imply
some action which would impair beauty. The normal meaning
is given by Sonnet xvii. :
 
Who will beleeve my verse in time to come
Ifjit were fild with your most high deserts ?
Though yet Heaven knowes it is but as a tombe
Which hides your life, and shows not halfe your parts.
 
 
 
138 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
This first use of the word has no doubt that it is eulogy ; the
Sonnet is glowing and dancing with his certitude. But when the
metaphor is repeated, this time without being explained, it has
grown dark with an incipient double meaning; ' I should fail you,
now that you have behaved so badly to me, if I tried to express
you in poetry; I should give you myself, and draw from my
readers, a cold and limited judgment, praise you without sincer-
ity, or blame you without thinking of the living man.' (' Simply
the thing I am Shall make me live'; Shakespeare continually
draws on a generosity of this kind. It is not 'tout comprendre,'
in his view, it is merely to feel how a man comes to be a working
system, which necessarily excites a degree of sympathy.) l
 
A literary conundrum is tedious, and these meanings are &nly
worth detaching in so far as they are dissolved into the single
mood of the poem. Many people would say that they cannot
all be dissolved, that an evidently delicate and slender Sonnet
ought not to take so much explaining, whatever its wealth of
reference and feeling, that Shakespeare, if all this is true, wrote
without properly clarifying his mind. One might protest via the
epithet 'natural,' which has stuck to Shakespeare through so
many literary fashions ; that he had a wide rather than a sharp
focus to his mind ; that he snatched ideas almost at random from
its balanced but multitudinous activity ; that this is likely to be
more so rather than less in his personal poetry; and that in short
(as Macaulay said in a very different connection) the reader must
take such grammar as he can get and be thankful. One might
apologise by saying that people have always read obscure mean-
ings into Shakespeare, secure in the feeling, ' If it means less, why
is it so beautiful?' and that this analysis can only be offered as
another mode of approaching so mysterious a totality, another
glance at the effects of language. Or it may boldly be said that
the composition of feeling, which never falls apart among these
 
1 The tomb is formal praise such as would be written on a tombstone,
whereas the real merits of the man are closely connected with his faults,
which can't be mentioned in a formal style of praise. I am not now sure that
the ambiguities of word and syntax add a great deal to what is clear enough
as the theme. That the feeling behind the poem is ambivalent would not,
I suppose, be denied.
 
Maybe I should explain that I put another complete analysis f% of a Shake-
speare Sonnet (xvi.) in the second chapter (p. 54) on the givund that it has
much less background of rudeness to W. H, than this later one.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 139
 
ambiguities (it is, on any interpretation, pained, bitter, tender and
admiring; Shakespeare is being abandoned by W. H., and stiffly
apologising for not having been servile to him), rises and is
clinched plainly in the final couplet; we are reminded of the
references to the roving eye glancing round for new conquests;
Shakespeare includes the whole ambiguity in his enthusiasm;
the worth and sin, the beauty and painting, are all delightful to
him, and too subtle to be grasped.
 
A Valediction, of weeping weeps for two reasons, which may
not at first sight seem very different; because their love when
they are together, which they must lose, is so valuable, and be-
cause they are * nothing' when they are apart. There is none of
the 'Platonic pretence Donne keeps up elsewhere, that their love
is independent of being together; he can find no satisfaction in
his hopelessness but to make as much of the actual situation of
parting as possible ; and the language of the poem is shot through
with a suspicion which for once he is too delicate or too pre-
occupied to state unambiguously, that when he is gone she will
be unfaithful to him. Those critics who say the poem is sincere,
by the way, and therefore must have been written to poor Anne,
know not what they do.
 
Let me powre forth
 
My teares before thy face, whil'st I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stampe they beare,
And by this Mintage they are something worth,
 
For thus they be
 
Pregnant of thee,
 
Fruits of much grief they are, emblemes of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falst which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore. 1
 
'Allow me this foolishness; let me cry thoroughly while I can
yet see your face, because my tears will be worth nothing, may,
in fact, not flow at all, when once I have lost sight of you.' ' Let
me plunge, at this dramatic moment, into my despair, so that by
its completeness I may be freed from it, and my tears may be
coined into something more valuable/
 
The metaphor of coining is suitable at first sight only ' because
your wortA and your beauty are both royal/ but other deductions
 
1 The three verses of the poem are quoted and examined separately.
 
 
 
140 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
from it can be made. In that his tears will not reflect her face
unless he stays here, it may imply * because it is only when I am
seeing your beauty that it matters so much to me ; I only shed
valuable tears about you when I am at your side.' There is a
shift of the metaphor in this, brought out by line 3, from the tears
as molten metal which must be stamped with her value to the
tears themselves as the completed coin; ' because/ then, 'you are
so fruitful of unhappiness ' ; and in either case, far in the back-
ground, in so far as she is not really such a queenly figure,
'because you are public, mercenary, and illegal.' l
 
In each of the three verses of the poem the two short middle
lines are separated only by commas from the lines before and
after them; Professor Grierson on the two occasions that he has
corrected this has accurately chosen the more important meaning,
and unnecessarily cut off the less. In this verse, for thus they be
may be a note to give the reasons why the tears are something
worthy or may be parallel to for thy face coins them, so that it leads
on to the rest of the stanza. Going backwards, ' Let me pour out
at once the tears I shall have to shed sooner or later, because if I
do it now they will reflect your face and become valuable because
they contain you ' ; going forwards, ' Let me pour forth my tears
before your face, because they are epitomes of you in this way,
that they are born in sorrow, and are signs that there is more
sorrow to come after.' Pregnant because they are like her, in that
they fall and are emblems of grief, and give true information about
her (as in 'a pregnant sentence'), because they are round and
large like a pregnancy, because they hold a reflection of her inside
them, and because, if they are wept in her presence, they will
carry her more completely with them, and so do him more good.
It is this last obscure sense, that he is getting rid of her, or satis-
fying her, or getting his feeling for her into a more manageable
form, by a storm of emotion in her presence, that gives energy to
the metaphor of pregnancy, and logic to the second alternative
the idea that she normally causes sorrow.
 
Corresponding to these alternative meanings of for thus, that
thou means 'the fact that you* and 'that particular case of you.'
 
1 I doubt now whether Donne would have minded leavine these con-
ceivable implications lying about, even if the poem were in fact written for
his wife. He might well have feared that she would throw Vip her reckless
marriage.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 141
 
' The tears are emblems of more grief by foreshowing, when they
fall, that you will fall who were the cause of them * (if which refers
to a person it should be the subject of bore), or, beginning a new
sentence at when, 'when a tear falls, that reflection of you which
it carries in it falls too ' (which now refers to a thing and so can
be the object).
 
And corresponding to these again, there is a slight variation
in the meaning of so, according as the last line stands alone or
follows on from the one before. 'These tears by falling show
that you will fall who were the cause of them. And therefore,
because you will fall when we are separated, when we are separ-
ated we shall both become nothing/ or 'When the reflection of
you is detached from my eye and put on a separate tear it falls ;
in the same way we shall ourselves fall and be nothing when we
are separated by water. 1
 
All these versions imply that their love was bound to lead to
unhappiness; the word fall expects unfaithfulness, as well as
negation, from her absence ; then means both ' when you fall ' and
'when we are separated/ as if they were much the same thing;
and nothing (never name her, child, if she be nought, advised
Mrs. Quickly) says the same of himself also, when a channel
divides them deeper, but no less salt, than their pool of tears.
 
On a round ball,
 
A workeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
 
So doth each teare
 
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow
Till my tears mixed with thine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
 
The first four lines are defining the new theme, and their gram-
mar is straightforward. Then the teare may be active or passive,
like the workeman or like the ball; on the face of it, it is like the
ball, but so doth may treat it as like the workeman. For doth may
be a separate verb as well as an auxiliary of grow, while, in any
case, grow may either mean 'turn into* or 'grow larger/ The
globe and the world may be either the teare or thee. The other
meanings of impression (p. 166) would be possible here. Either,
then, ' In the same way each tear that wears you, who are a whole
 
 
 
142 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
world yourself or at least the copy of one, grows into a world/ or
* And so does every tear that wears you ; each tear, that is, grows,
so as to include everything, or to produce a great deal more
water'; it is only this second, vaguer meaning which gives a
precise meaning to till, and suggests, instead of a mere heap of
world-tears, such a flood as descended upon the wickedness of
the antediluvians.
 
Which thee doth weare suggests by the order of the words a
more normal meaning, that her tears are jewels and she is wearing
them; this is inverted by the grammar, so as to leave an impres-
sion that she is uniquely and unnaturally under the control of her
tears, or even has no existence independent of them.
 
The last line but one may stand alone, with overflow meafiing
simply 'flow excessively/ or 'flow into each other/ so as to spoil
each other's shape, and then the last line, by itself, means, ' In the
same way, the necessities of this, the real, world have dissolved
my precarious heaven by means of, or into, tears.' Or making
world the object of overflow, it may mean, according as this world
is the real world or the tear, either ' we produce more and more
tears till we drown the world altogether, and can no longer see
things like ordinary people/ or 'my tear reflects you and so is a
world till one of your tears falls on it, spoils its shape and leaves
only a splash ' ; it is she who has made the world which is his
heaven, and she who destroys it. The rest of the line then says,
' in the same way my happiness in our love has been dissolved,
by this meeting with your tears/ making heaven the subject of the
intransitive verb dissolved. But my heaven may be in apposition
to thee ; dissolved may be a participle ; and so may be not ' in the
same way' but 'so completely, so terribly'; it is not merely his
memory and idea and understanding of her, it is the actual
woman herself, as she was when they were happy together, who
is dissolving under his eyes into the tears of this separation ; dis-
solved, it has already happened. The waters are falling that were
above the firmament; the heaven and crystalline spheres, which
were she, are broken; she is no longer the person he made her,
and will soon be made into a different person by another lover.
These broken pieces of grammar which may be fitted together in
so many ways are lost phrases jerked out whilst sobbing, and in
the reading, 'so my heaven dissolved this world/ which though
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 143
 
far in the background is developed in the following stanza, there
is a final echo of unexplained reproach.
 
O more than Moone,
 
Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,
Weep me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare
To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone,
 
Let not the winde
 
Example finde,
 
TO do me more harm, then it purpose th,
Since thou and I sigh one another's breath,
Whoe'er sighs most, is cruellest, and hasts the other's death.
 
She is Moone, with a unifying reference to the first line of the
poerfi, because she draws up the tides of weeping both from him
and from herself, a power not necessarily to her credit, but at any
rate deserving adoration; the moon, too, is female, inconstant,
chaste because though bright cold, and has armes in which the
new moon holds the old one. Some of the lyrical release in the
line may be explained as because it is deifying her, and remem-
bering the Sidney tradition, even now after so many faults in her
have been implied, and are still being implied. She is more than
Moone because she is more valuable to him than anything in the
real world to which he is being recalled ; because she has just
been called either the earth or the heavens and they are larger
than the moon; as controlling tides more important or more
dangerous than those of the sea; as making the world more
hushed and glamorous than does moonlight; as being more in-
constant, or as being more constant, than the moon; as being
able to draw tides right up to her own sphere ; as shining by her
own light; and as being more powerful because closer.
 
In thy spheare may be taken with me, 'don't drown me,
whether with my tears or your own, now that I am still fairly
happy and up in your sphere beside you ; don't trouble to draw
up the seas so high, or be so cruel as to draw up the seas so high,
that they drown me now, since to-morrow they will drown me
easily, when I am thrown down into the world'; may be taken
alone, as ' your sphere of influence,' your sort of drowning, ' don't
you go drowning me ; I have the whole sea to drown me when I
take ship to-morrow'; or may be taken with Moone > 'you, far in
your sphere, high and safe from sorrow in your permanence and
 
 
 
144 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
your power to change, do not drown a poor mortal who is not
 
in your sphere, to whom these things matter more deeply.'
 
The machinery of interpretation is becoming too cumbrous
here, in that I cannot see how these meanings come to convey
tenderness rather than the passion of grief which has preceded
them, how they come to mark a particular change of tone, a
return towards control over the situation, which makes them
seem more vividly words actually spoken. It is a question of the
proportions in which these meanings are accepted, and^their
interactions ; it is not surprising that the effect should be what
it is, but I do not know that it could have been foreseen. Perhaps
it is enough to say that the request, in its fantastic way, is more
practical, and draws its point from the immediate situation/
 
Weep me not dead means: 'do not make me cry myself to
death; do not kill me with the sight of your tears; do not cry
for me as for a man already dead, when, in fact, I am in your
arms/ and, with a different sort of feeling, 'do not exert your
power over the sea so as to make it drown me by sympathetic
magic'; there is a conscious neatness in the ingenuity of the
phrasing, perhaps because the same idea is being repeated, which
brings out the change of tone in this verse. What it may doe too
soone, since the middle lines may as usual go forwards or back-
wards, may be said of the sea or of the winde\ if of the winde the
earlier syntax may be 'forbeare in order to teach the sea to be
calm ' ; this gives point to the crude logic, which has in any case
a sort of lyrical ease, of * do not weep, but forbeare to weep.' The
sea is going to separate them; it may be going to drown him;
and so it may drown him, for all he cares, when he has lost her.
The winde purposeth to blow him from her, and if she doesn't
stop sighing she will teach it to do more harm, and upset the boat.
One may notice the contrast between the danger and discomfort
of this prospect, also the playfulness or brutality of the request,
and the cooing assured seductive murmur of the sound doe too
soone\ by this time he is trying to soothe her.
 
I always think of this poem as written before Donne's first
voyage with Essex, which he said he undertook to escape from
'the queasy pain of loving and being loved'; the fancy is trivial
but brings out the change of tone in the last two lines. In itself
the notion is a beautiful one, 'our sympathy is so perfect that any
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 145
 
expression of sorrow will give more pain to the other party than
relief to its owner, so we ought to be trying to cheer each other
up/ but to say this is to abandon the honest luxuriance of sorrow
with which they have been enlivening their parting, to try to
forget feeling in a bright, argumentative, hearty quaintness (the
good characters in Dickens make the orphan girl smile through
her tears in this way); the language itself has become flattened
and explanatory : so that he almost seems to be feeling for his
hat. .But perhaps I am libelling this masterpiece ; all one can say
is that its passion exhausts itself; it achieves at the end the sense
of reality he was looking for, and some calm of mind. 1
 
This poem is ambiguous because his feelings were painfully
mixed, and because he felt that at such a time it would be un-
generous to spread them out clearly in his mind; to express
sorrow at the obvious fact of parting gave an adequate relief to
his disturbance, and the variety of irrelevant, incompatible ways
of feeling about the affair that were lying about in his mind were
able so to modify, enrich, leave their mark upon this plain lyrical
relief as to make it something more memorable.
 
I hope I have now made clear what the fourth type is like when
it really gets under way; I shall add some much slighter cases
which seemed illuminating.
 
What if this present were the world's last night ?
 
Mark in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
 
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
 
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
 
Teares in his eyes quench the amasing light,
 
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.
 
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
 
Which prayed forgivenesse for his foes fierce spight ?
 
No, no; but as in my idolatrie
 
I said to all my profane mistresses,
 
Beauty, of pitty, foulness onely is
 
A sign of rigour; so I say to thee,
 
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign 'd,
 
This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.
 
(DoNNE, Holy Sonnets, xiii.)
In one's first reading of the first line, the dramatic idea is of
 
1 It seems at least possible that they may choose to dp each other less harm
than they could ; he seems therefore to have cured himself of some of the
earlier suspicions. I still think that all this analysis is correct.
K
 
 
 
146 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Donne pausing in the very act of sin, stricken and swaddled by
a black unexpected terror : suppose the end of the world came
now ? The preacher proceeds to comfort us after this shock has
secured our attention. But looking back, and taking for granted
the end's general impression of security, the first line no longer
conflicts with it. ' Why, this may be the last night, but God is
loving. What if it were ? ' In the first notion one must collect
one's mind to answer the Lord suddenly, and Donne, in fact,
shuffles up an old sophistry from Plato, belonging to the lyrical
tradition he rather despised, and here even more absurdly flattering
to the person addressed and doubtful as to its general truth than
on the previous occasions he has found it handy. Is a man in the
last stages of torture so beautiful, even if blood hides his frowns ?
Never mind about that, he is pleased, we have carried it off all
right; the great thing on these occasions is to have a ready tongue. 1
A similar doubt as to emphasis runs through the Apparition,
and almost leaves one in doubt between two moods ; an amused
pert and fanciful contempt, written up with more elaboration
than it deserves, so as to give him an air of being detached from
her and interested in literature; and the scream of agony and
hatred by which this is blown aside.
 
Then thy sicke taper will begin to winke
 
is a bumping line full of guttering and oddity, but brisk with a
sense of power over her. This has reached a certain intensity
by the time we get to
 
thinke
 
Thou call'st for more,
And in false sleepe will from thee shrinke.
 
with the stresses in the line almost equal ; Crashaw uses a similar
rhythm to convey a chanting and mystical certainty,
And in her first ranks make thee room.
 
Donne's version conveys : * I am speaking quite seriously, with
conviction, but with personal indifference, to this toad.'
 
And then poore Aspen wretch, neglected thou
All in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lye
A veryer ghost than I.
 
1 I leave in my expression of distaste for the poem, but it nas little to do
with the ambiguity in question.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 147
 
The stress is on neglected', 'you would be glad to get me back
now if you could.* But
 
since my love is spent *
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
 
What a placid epigrammatical way of stopping, we are to think,
and how trivial the affair is made by this final admission that she
is innocent ! he would not say that if he cared for her any more.
But* after all, the first line calls her a murderess, and the way
most people read the poem makes the poet more seriously
involved ;
 
Then thy sicke taper will begin to winke
 
 
('As does mine now; you have left me ill and exhausted/ and
the last part of the line gabbles with fury.)
 
And in false sleepe will from thee shrinke
 
('As you, if I can credit it, as you have shrunk from me\ with a
disgust which I shall yet turn to terror.')
 
And then poore Aspen wretch, neglected thou
 
(It is almost a childish cry; 'I find it intolerable to be so neg-
lected/)
 
A veryer ghost than /
 
('Than I am now/ not 'than I shall be then'); that his love is
spent has become pathetically unbelievable ;
 
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent
 
'(As I am repenting, in agony'); and innocent has become a
scream of jealous hatred at her hypocrisy, of an impotent desire
to give any pain he can find.
 
The meaning of an English sentence is largely decided by the
accent, and yet one learns in conversation to put the accent in
several places at once ; it may be possible to read the poem so as to
combine these two ways of underlining it. But these last two
cases are curious in that the alternative versions seem particularly
hard to unite into a single vocal effect. You may be intended,
while reading a line one way, to be conscious that it could be read
in another; 1 so that if it is to be read aloud it must be read twice;
or you may be intended to read it in some way different from the
 
 
 
148 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
colloquial speech-movement so as to imply both ways at once.
Different styles of reading poetry aloud use these methods in
different proportions, but perhaps these two last examples from
Donne respectively demand the two methods in isolation. The
following example from Hopkins shows the first case being
forcibly included in the second.
 
Margaret, are you grieving
 
Over Goldengrove unleafing?
 
Leaves, like the things of man, you
 
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you ?
 
Ah, as the heart grows older
 
It will come to such sights colder
 
By and by, nor spare a sigh
 
Though world of wan wood leafmeal lie ;
 
And yet you will weep and know why.
 
Now no matter, child, the name.
 
Sorrow's springs are the same.
 
Nor mouth had, no, nor mind express 'd,
 
What heart heard of, ghost guess 'd :
 
It is the blight man was born for,
 
It is Margaret you mourn for.
 
Will weep may mean : * insist upon weeping, now or later,' or
'shall weep in the future/ Know in either case may follow will,
like weep y 'you insist upon knowing, or you shall know/ or may
mean : ' you already know why you weep, why you shall weep,
or why you insist upon weeping,' or thirdly, may be imperative,
' listen and I shall tell you why you weep, or shall weep, or shall
insist upon weeping, or insist upon weeping already.' Mr.
Richards, from whom I copy this (Practical Criticism, p. 83),
considers that the ambiguity of will is removed by the accent
which Hopkins placed upon it; it seems to me rather that it is
intensified. Certainly, with the accent on weep and and, will can
only be the auxiliary verb, and with the accent on will its main
meaning is 'insist upon.' But the future meaning also can be
imposed upon this latter way of reading the line if it is the tense
which is being stressed, if it insists on the contrast between the
two sorts of weeping, or, including know with weep, between the
two sorts of knowledge. Now it is useful that the tense should
be stressed at this crucial point, because it is these two contrasts
and their unity which make the point of the poem.
 
It seems difficult to enjoy the accent on are, which the poet
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 149
 
has inserted; I take it to mean: 'Sorrow's springs, always the
same, independent of our attitude to them and o our degree of
consciousness of them, exist/ permanently and as it were
absolutely.
 
The two sorts of knowledge, intuitive and intellectual, form
ambiguities again in the next couplet; this may help to show
they are really there in the line about will. Mouth and mind may
belong to Margaret or somebody else ; what heart heard of goes
both forwards and backwards; and ghost, which in its gram-
matical position means both the profundities of the unconscious-
ness and the essentially conscious spirit, brings to mind both
immortality and a dolorous haunting of the grave. 'Nobody
else's mouth had told her, nobody else's mind had hinted to her,
about the fact of mortality, which yet her own imagination had
already invented, which her own spirit could foresee.' 'Her
mouth had never mentioned death; she had never stated the idea
to herself so as to be conscious of it; but death, since it was a
part of her body, since it was natural to her organs, was known at
sight as a portent by the obscure depths of her mind.' My point
is not so much that these two are mixed up as that the poet has
shown precisely by insisting that they were the same, that he
knew they were distinguishable.
 
A much fainter example of the sort of ambiguity in question
is supplied by one of Pope's great passages about dowagers, which
possesses in a high degree the sensuous beauty that is supposed
to have been beyond his powers :
 
As hags hold sabbats, not for joy but spite,
So these their merry miserable night ;
So round and round the ghosts of beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their honour died.
 
See how the world its veterans rewards.
A youth of frolics, an old age of cards.
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without lovers, old without a friend;
A fop her passion, and her prize a sot;
Alive ridiculous, and dead forgot.
 
(Essay on Women, Ep. n. 245.)
 
An impression of febrile and uncontrollable hatred is given to
the terrible climax of this passage by the flat, indifferent little
words, fop, sot, which, if they are to fill out the line, to give it
 
 
 
50 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
weight, as its meaning and position demand, cannot be dropped
with the analytical contempt with which they appear on the
printed page ; must be hurled at a person conceived as in front
of you, to whom you know they are intolerable. Never was the
couplet more of a rocking-horse if each line is considered separ-
ately; but all the inertia of this flatness is needed to give him
strength; never was the couplet given more delicacy of modula-
tion than is here imposed by the mere weight and passion^of the
sense conveyed. What is so compelling about the passage is the
combination within it of two sharply distinguished states 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, two such different moods would both be in-
cluded, laid side by side, made relevant as if by a generalisation ;
in the fourth type they react with one another to produce some-
thing different from either, and here the reaction is an explosion.
 
I spoke of 'sensuous beauty/ thinking of the second couplet
quoted, to which a more verbal analysis can be applied. The
dowagers may glide round and round because they are still dancing,
or merely, since they are fixed to the card-table in the next
couplet, because they go on and on, in rotation, to the same
drawing-rooms. In this way they may at once be conceived as
still dancing and yet as at an age when, in those days, they would
have had to stop. They are first spoken of as ghosts of their dead
beauty, and will then be thought of as still dancing, since such
ghosts would still be echoing what they had done in life ; but in
the next line they are ghosts of their dead honour, haunting a place
only, and that not so much the ballroom as the card-table. (These
places, however, are practically the same, so there is an independ-
ent ambiguity as to whether they lost their honour by cheating at
the card-table or making assignations in the ballroom.) The
result of this is that the two lines cannot run as simply as they
claim to do ; ghosts means something different for each line, and
you must in each case translate the line back into something said
about old ladies, or the transitions will not work. But one is
accustomed to this process of immediate translation onjy in verses
of flowery and graceful ornament, so that it is a parody of the
manner in which a gallant compliment would have been paid
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 151
 
to the ladies, and has a ghastly air of being romantic and
charming.
 
I must not deny that the ghost of a dead beatfty might haunt
the place where her honour had died, as she might haunt the place
where anything that interested her had happened. If you read
it like this, there is a touch of that form of wit which caps a sen-
tence with the unexpected word ; * you might think she was most
distressed at losing her beauty; but no, it's her conscience that
troubles the old woman, and well it may/ However, I find it
very difficult to read the lines like this; they stand too completely
parallel and apart, and read like one blow after another.
 
Or you may say from this parallelism that beauty and honour
are* treated as necessary corollaries of one another, the two
names being used in the two lines only for variety (as if from the
old dictionary interest in synonyms); so that ghosts of beauty
are the same as ghosts of honour, and had necessarily to lose their
properties in the same place. Beauty and honour, then, are
identical, so that we find ourselves, to our justifiable surprise, in
Spenser's fairy-story world of sensuous idealism. There is a sort
of subterranean resonance in the verses from the clash of this
association ; with a feverish anger, like the screws of a liner racing
above water, Pope finds himself indeed hag-ridden by these poor
creatures; they excite in him feelings irrelevantly powerful, of
waste, of unavoidable futility, which no bullying of its object
can satisfy.
 
Wordsworth was not an ambiguous poet; the cult of
simplicity moved its complexity back into the subconscious,
poisoned only the sources of thought, in the high bogs of the
mountains, and stated as simply as possible the fundamental
disorders of the mind. But he sometimes uses what may be
called philosophical ambiguities when he is not sure how far
this process can tolerably be pushed. In the third type we
found minor uses of ambiguity for jokes ; the fourth type in-
cludes its electoral applications. Thus the degree of pantheism
implied by some of Wordsworth's most famous passages depends
very much on the taste of the reader, who can impose grammar
without difficulty to uphold his own views.
 
For I have learnt
lo look on nature, not as in the hour
 
 
 
152 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
 
And rolls through all things. //r . ., , .
 
to & (Tintern Abbey.)
 
It is not sufficient to say that these lines convey with gieat
beauty the mood intended; Wordsworth seems to have believed
in his own doctrines and wanted his readers to know what they
were. It is reasonable, then, to try to extract from this passage
definite opinions on the relations of God, man, and nature, and
on the means by which such relations can be known.
 
There are several points of difficulty in the grammar when one
tries to do this. It is not certain what is more deeply interfused
than what. It is not certain whether the music of humanity is the
same as the presence', they are separated by the word and and a
full stop. We may notice, too, that the word in seems to distin-
guish, though but faintly, the mind of man from the light, the
ocean, the air and the sky; this tends to separate the motion and
the spirit form from the presence and the something; but they
may, again, all be identical with the music. Wordsworth may
then have felt a something far more deeply interfused than the
presence that disturbed him ; we seem here to have God revealing
himself in particular to the mystic, but being in a more funda-
mental sense immanent in his whole creation. 1 Or the something
may be in apposition to the presence (the sense equal to the joy);
so that both are ' more ' deeply interfused than the music of human-
ity, but apparently in the same way. This version only conceives
God as immanent in his creation, and as affecting the poet in the
same way as he affects everything else ; or as only imagined by
the poet as immanent in creation, in the same way as the music of
 
1 Or one may stand for paganism (the local deity of a bit of late scenery,
say) and the other for the more puzzling doctrine (far more deeply interfused)
on which Wordsworth would support it.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 153
 
humanity is imagined as immanent. Thus, the first version is
Christian, the second in part pantheistic, in part agnostic. Again,
the something may possibly dwell only in the natural objects
mentioned, ending at sky\ the motion and the spirit are then not
thought of at all as interfused into nature, like the something ; they
are things active in the mind of man. At the same time they are
similar to the something ; thus Wordsworth either feels them br
feels a sense of them. With this reading the voice would rise in
some triumph at the words mind of man\ man has a spirit
immanent in nature in the same way as is the spirit of God, and
is decently independent from him. Or the something may also
dwell in the mind of man, and have the motion and the spirit in
appbsition to it; under this less fortunate arrangement a God
who is himself nature subjects us at once to determinism and
predestination.
 
So far I have been examining grammatical ambiguities, but
the last three lines also admit of doubt, as to the purpose of what
seems an irrelevant distinction. Whether man or some form of
God is subject here, he distinguishes between things which are
objects or subjects of thought, these he impels; and things which
are neither objects nor subjects of thought, through these he
merely rolls. (I am not sure what is the logical status of the
things not the objects of thought about which Wordsworth is
thinking here ; after all, he is not thinking very hard, so it may be
all right.) The only advantage I can see in this distinction is that
it makes the spirit at once intelligent and without intelligence;
at once God and nature ; allows us to think of him as the second,
without compromising his position as the first. 1
 
And, indeed, whether or not a great deal of wisdom is en-
shrined in these lines, lines just as muddled, superficially speak-
 
1 Critics have disliked the meanness and fussiness of this passage, and
I wish that I had something wise and reconciling to say after all these years.
Miss M. C. Bradbrook wrote that the nouns after the full stop are all obviously
in apposition, because the theme is the transcendence of the subject-object
relationship. It is, I suppose, almost certain that Wordsworth meant the
grammar to run on like this. But surely, even if clauses are in apposition,
they must be supposed to be somehow distinguishable, or why do they have
to be said one after another ? One could give a much more sympathetic
account of the philosophical background of Wordsworth, and no doubt if
I. A. Richards* Coleridge on Imagination had been already published I would
have written differently. But the more seriously one takes the doctrine, it
seems to me, the more this expression of it seems loose rhetoric.
 
 
 
iS4 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
ing, may convey a mode of using their antinomies, and so act as
creeds. The reason why one grudges Wordsworth this source of
strength is tha{ he talks as if he owned a creed by which his half-
statements might be reconciled, whereas, in so far as his creed
was definite, he found these half-statements necessary to keep it
at bay. There is something rather shuffling about this attempt
to be uplifting yet non-denominational, to put across as much
pantheism as would not shock his readers. I must protest again
that I enjoy the lines very much, and find, like everybody else,
that I remember them; probably it was necessary for Words-
worth to shuffle, if he was to maintain his peculiar poetical
attitude. And, of course, by considering the example in this
chapter, I have shown that I regard the shuffling as a deeply-
rooted necessity, not conscious at the time when it was achieved.
But, perhaps, this last example may show how these methods can
be used to convict a poet of holding muddled opinions rather
than to praise the complexity of the order of his mind. To the
more fruitful sorts of muddle I must proceed in my next chapter.
 
 
 
A 4 ambiguity of the fifth type occurs when the author is dis-
covering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it 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. 1 Shakespeare
continually does it :
 
Our Natures do pursue
 
Like Rats that ravyn downe their proper Bane
A thirsty evil, and when we drinke we die.
. (Measure for Measure, I. ii.)
 
Evidently the first idea was that lust itself was the poison ; but
the word proper, introduced as meaning 'suitable for rats,' but
also having an irrelevant suggestion of 'right and natural,' and
more exact memory of those (nowadays phosphorus) poisons
which are designed to prevent rats from dying in the wainscot,
produced the grander and less usual image, in which the eating
of the poison corresponds to the Fall of Man, and it is drinking
water, a healthful and natural human function, which it is intoler-
able to avoid, and which brings death. By reflection, then, proper
bane becomes ambiguous, since it is now water as well as poison.
Ford is fond of the same device, possibly from imitation :
 
GIOVANNI. Now, now, work serious thoughts on baneful plots;
Be all a man, my soul ; let not the curse
Of old prescription rend from me the gall
Of courage, which enrolls a glorious death:
If I must totter like a well-grown oak, :
Some undershrubs shall in my weighty fall
Be crushed to splits; with me they all 'shall -perish.
 
('Tis Pity, v. iii. end.)
 
Gall is first used as 'spirit to resent insults,' the bitterness which
is a proper part of the complete man. (We have galls: Othello,
IV. iii. 93.) By the next line galls have suggested oak-galls (the
 
1 This is at least ambiguous in the sense that the reader is puzzled by it;
but the definition does not assert that there would be alternative reactions
to the passage when completely grasped, or that the effect necessarily marks
a complex but integral state of mind in the author. I could claim, I think,
that the confusion technique needs separate treatment, and it is put late in
the book as showing much logical disorder.
 
155
 
 
 
iS6 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
reactions of an oak to irritations), and the idea of proper retalia-
tion is transferred to its power of falling on people, whether they
are guilty of wrongs against it or not. But in between these two
definite meanings the curious word enrolled seems a blurring of
the focus ; he is thinking of his situation itself, rather than either
metaphor, and keeping up the metaphorical language rather as
a matter of form.
 
A glorious death may be enrolled on the scroll of fame, so that
the word could stand by itself; or, looking backwards, one may
gain strength for a glorious death by being bathed in, sustained
by, a spurt of bitterness, so that gall has been rent (now with the
opposite consequences) from its boundaries in the orderly mind,
by being rolled in, or round about by, gall', or, looking back-
wards, it may be the oak itself which rolls down, both to death
and upon its victims. You may say this is fanciful, and he was
only looking for a word containing the letter *r' which kept up
the style, but in that case it is these associations which explain
how that particular word came into his mind. I do not claim
that one should admire this turgid piece of writing merely be-
cause it is explicable. 1
 
This form of ambiguity was fairly common in the nineteenth
century; there is an example in the Shelley Skylark, about which
Mr. Eliot started a discussion. I am afraid more points were
brought out than I remembered.
 
The pale purple even
 
Melts around thy flight ;
Like a star of Heaven,
 
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight
 
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
 
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
 
All the earth and air
 
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
 
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.
 
1 A trivial example from Dryden omitted.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 157
 
Mr. Eliot claimed not to know what the sphere was; one would
take it to be the star, as a matter of grammar. But the simile goes
tumbling on into the next verse ; the bad rhyme clear there
air may serve as evidence of this. The sphere is then the moon ;
both moon and star are made fainter by the morning. There are
two syntaxes for the verse : ' your delight is as keen as are the
arrows of the sphere,' and 'though the arrows of the sphere are
so keen (as to carry a long way), yet even when we are so far off
as to 6e out of shot we still feel the presence of its beauty/ The
last line may mean : ' We feel that your delight is there for a long
time, until, in fact, we can hardly see you/ or 'whose lamp nar-
rows till we can scarcely be said to see it, till we can more truly
be fcaid to feel that it is there. 1 All these are well enough suited
to the first simile, in which the lark, out of sight but still audible
as a series of silvery notes, is compared to a star, which is spher-
ical and whose light is silvery, out of sight in the daytime but still
faintly sounding the music of the spheres. The arrows are then
the bird's separate piercing notes and the star's separate twinkles,
whether conceived as searching the poet's heart or as rays drawn
on an optical diagram. In this simile we jump from daylight to
dawn to illustrate as process what was before considered as
achieved ; as the lark becomes smaller, then invisible, as the star
grows smaller, then goes out, so the poet is rapt into an ecstasy
which purifies itself into nescience, and faints from the full clarity
of beauty. In the new simile, therefore, the time of completion
is not day but night, and it is for this reason that the lark begins
the first verse quoted by going up in the evening. (Mr. Eliot
complained that Shelley had mixed up two of these periods; it
seems less of an accident when you notice that he names all four.)
The bird is now like the moon, either when just emerging from a
cloud, so that there is still a process though the sphere is now
becoming more, not less, visible ; or when behind a cloud, so that
though it leaves the earth in darkness (as the bird is out of
sight) it can be recognised by its light on the edges of other
clouds as something which is overflowing (being too great an
ecstasy for) their upper surfaces. For this version bare means
'dark/ and is contrasted with overflowed. Or, taking bare as
' empty/ though the moon itself is not in sight the whole sky is
glimmering with moonlight which has touched the invisible mists
 
 
 
158 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
of the upper air; the moon has overflowed its limitations, and
takes effect mysteriously, like the poet, like the principle of
beauty, even on those who cannot directly apprehend it. For
the bird is a symbol of the poet; so is the cloud the poet and the
moon behind it his inspiration ; one of the basic assumptions of
Shelley's poetry is that the poet stands in a very peculiar relation
to ordinary people; he is an outcast and an unacknowledged
legislator, and probably dying as well.
 
Of the meanings of arrows those involving a series of shofs may
seem less suited to the moon than to the star, as the moon does
not twinkle ; but they are helped out by the word rains, by the
idea of the moon suddenly emerging from the cloud to give a
brief overwhelming illumination, and by the idea of Diana as'the
huntress. This last, indeed, may be regarded as the point of the
new simile ; her beauty is too keen and too unattainable, so as to
destroy the humanity which apprehends it. And the transition
from one simile to another itself produces an effect which must
be conceived in terms of this belief ; one is forced to swoon, in an
ecstatic and febrile way, not rooted upon the earth, from flower
to flower, and to find all exquisite and all unsatisfying. 'How
exciting all these beautiful things are ! here is another beautiful
thing, which all my readers will think beautiful/
 
The poem was probably written under the influence of the
Keats Nightingale Ode, and for it to seem straightforward one
must hold the main tenets of the Romantics. The skylark, I
should have said before, is a very precise symbol of Shelley's
view of the poet; it rises higher and higher, straight upwards,
alone, always singing, always in effort, till becoming exhausted
somewhere out of sight of the normal world it tumbles back in
silence, and resumes a humble, isolated, and invisible existence
somewhere in the middle of a field. But on to this view of the
bird as a symbol of the spiritual life, which thinks of it as strug-
gling and dying, is grafted another view which thinks of it as
outside human limitations; as free from pain and the satiety
which follows mortal ecstasy, and indeed, like the nightingale, as
immortal. From this point of view the rising of the skylark is an
apotheosis of nature and unquestioned animal satisfaction (as at
once more and less than human, and so in either cape'free from
our inadequacy), which is shown either rising to Heaven, because
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 159
 
nature is superior to the complex and disorderly human processes
which apprehend it (the natural is divine), or near it, that is,
rising to the stars or the moon, and so to one of the crystalline
spheres (the natural is perfect). Its song, therefore, becomes
something absolute, fundamental, outside time, and underlying
all terrestrial harmony. (Surely it was unappreciative of Mr.
Eliot to call that extremely packed line 'shabby.')
 
Such beauty is never wholly known by human limitations, and
as it grows more it must grow less visible. The sphere narrowing
in daylight, then, is like the narrowing of the poet's iris or eyelids,
in the ecstasy of Romantic appreciation, like that fainting of the
temporal mind in the very act of recognition of the eternal and
absolute beauty, which Shelley has elsewhere compared to the
fading of a red-hot coal. ' Now more than ever were it rich to
die'; 'thou wert not born for death, immortal Bird.' The lark
is dawning into its day of joy just as the day of common earth is
fading, and, to complete the reversal, the mind which has dark-
ened, * forlorn,' from the vision of natural beauty, may then dawn
again into an intellectual apprehension of it. The grammatical
disorder of the verses is a very proper expression of the doctrine
they convey. 1
 
Another point Mr. Eliot has raised against Shelley is suscept-
ible of the same sort of explanation :
 
The world's great age begins anew,
 
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
 
Her winter weeds outworn ;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. , rj // \
 
Mr. Eliot said that snakes do not renew their cast skins, and do
not cast them at the end of winter ; and that a seventeenth-
century poet would have known his own mind on such points.
Weeds means both * garments,' especially those of widows, like
the old and dried snake-skin, and * vegetation,' especially such
coarse and hardy plants as would last through the winter, till
something more interesting came up in the spring. Evidently it
 
1 There seems no need to claim any ' grammatical disorder ' ; the sphere
can be taken simply as the Morning Star. However, the example shows,
I think, that th l technique of tumbling from one simile to another is likely
to produce this type of ambiguity.
 
 
 
160 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
is the second half of the pun which justifies the bad natural
history; the snake is relevant as gleaming, as a classical symbol of
fertility and earth-spirits, and as effecting a transition to widows. 1
I agree very heartily with what Mr. Eliot was saying at the time,
and certainly these meanings are not so much united as hurried
on top of each other, but it is, after all, a pun, almost a conceit.
At the same time the thought seems excessively confused; this
muddle of ideas clogging an apparently simple lyrical flow may
be explained, but is not therefore justified; and it is evident that
a hearty appetite for this and the following type of ambiguity
would apologise for, would be able to extract pleasure from, very
bad poetry indeed.
 
In so far as an ambiguity sustains intricacy, delicacy, or com-
pression of thought, or is an opportunism devoted to saying
quickly what the reader already understands, it is to be respected
(in so far, one is tempted to say, as the same thing could not have
been said so effectively without it, but, of course, in poetry the
same thing could never have been said in any other way). It is
not to be respected in so far as it is due to weakness or thinness
of thought, obscures the matter in hand unnecessarily (without
furthering such incidental purposes as we have considered) or,
when the interest of the passage is not focussed upon it, so that
it is merely an opportunism in the handling of material, if the
reader will not easily understand the ideas which are being
shuffled, and will be given a general impression of incoherence.
The ideas in the Shelley Skylark (if my interpretation is right)
were obvious to Shelley, were, in fact, the main cause of the
excitement he was translating into lyrical terms, but if they were
to appear at all they required to be explained and kept in his
conscious mind. The question is here one of focus; and it is
in modern poetry, when the range of ideas is great and the diffi-
culty of holding the right ones in the mind becomes acute, that
we discover examples of the most advanced types of this series,
and that ambiguity is most misused.
 
One might regard as an extreme case of the transitional simile
that 'self-inwoven' simile employed by Shelley, when not being
 
1 The snake gleams in its new skin ; the old skin looks dull, and yet that
seems to be compared to the faiths and empires (since they are wrecked).
Or are they seen as burgeoning in the new spring while known to be tem-
porary ? This, I think, is the interesting part of the confusion.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 161
 
able to think of a comparison fast enough he compares the thing
to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself, or points out that
it is its own nature, or that it sustains itself by supporting itself.
 
With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist
Of elemental subtlety, like light.
 
(Prometheus Unbound, iv.)
 
The matter of the vision is so highly informed, so ethereal, that
it can be compared to the Pure Form of which it is the matter.
 
Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil . . .
The spirit of the earth is laid asleep,
And you can see its little lips are moving
 
Within the changing light of their own smiles
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream.
 
(Ibid.)
 
The last comparison is merely a statement of what he is.
 
So came a chariot in the silent storm
Of its own rushing splendour. . . .
 
me sweetest flowers delayed not long . . .
Me, not the phantom of that early Form
Which moved upon its motion, ...
 
(The Triumph of Life.)
 
The Form is its own justification ; it sustains itself, like God, by
the fact that it exists. Poetry which idolises its object naturally
gives it the attributes of deity, but to do it in this way is to
destroy the simile, or make it incapable of its more serious func-
tions. Shelley seldom perceived profitable relations between two
things, he was too helplessly excited by one thing at a time, and
that one thing was often a mere notion not conceived in action or
in an environment. But, even with so limited an instrument as
the short-circuited comparison, he could do great things.
 
And others mournfully within the gloom
 
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death.
 
(Ibid.)
 
My definition also gave ' not holding all the idea in one's mind
at once* as a criterion. Any fortunate muddle would be included
in this, such as occurs in the course of digesting one's material.
L
 
 
 
162 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Shakespeare's Ariachne (Troilus, v. 4), for Arachne and Ariadne,
those two employers of thread, is a shining example.
 
I saw fair Chloris walk alone
When feathered rain came softly down,
Like Jove descending from his tower
To court her in a silver shower.
 
(ANON., Oxford Book.)
 
Chloris herself was evidently not in the tower of Danae, because
she was out walking in the snow; besides, the possession of
towers is a sufficiently male characteristic; and there must be
something from which the snow is to fall. Altogether the tower
may just as well be given to Jupiter, and this makes sure that the
reader will remember the right story. There is a delicious air of
being everyday and humble in that the shower is not gold but
silver-, after all, no one could deny it was as good as that. In so
far as the snow is feathered, another myth is brought into the
situation, and she is Leda as well as Danae. All this is what the
Freudians would call transference; and being a psychological
rather than a linguistic matter, one is not surprised to find that,
in a more deeply-rooted, less gay and conscious form, it was of
great use to the poets of the nineteenth century.
 
The following odd and delicious example treats what I believe
was a conscious pun as if it was an accident, and leaves piled up
in a * sweet disorder ' what the conceit would have found it hard
to enclose.
 
The Rose was sick and smiling died ;
 
And, being to be sanctified,
 
About the bed there sighing stood
 
The sweet and flowery sisterhood :
 
Some hung the head, while some did bring,
 
To wash her, water from the spring.
 
(HERRICK, The Funeral Rites of the Rose.)
 
The comparison with maids of honour is not being worked out in
any detail, and they fetch water from the spring merely because it
is a fresh and pastoral sort of place to fetch it from. But surely,
in the background, the spring is also the springtime; they fetch
from the spring, which is the morning of the year, the dews of
morning; they wash her with the dew of their ow freshness, in
that they are the flowers of spring; are, indeed, therefore (so
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 163
 
brief is life) already dead before her, and experienced in the
matter; and if the water is dew they wash her with their tears.
 
The thing is not worked out coherently befcause Herrick is
almost afraid to touch creatures of such delicacy; only in the
most tangent, the most unselfseeking, medium will they allow
him to observe them; and only in these hinted conceits, floating,
treasured and uncertain, can he satisfy himself as if by capture
what is so painfully unattained.
 
Swinburne uses this wider variety of the fifth type for a sort of
mutual comparison which (unlike the mutual comparisons in the
third type) is not interested in either of the things compared; he
merely uses the connections between them to present the reader
wfth a wide group of his stock associations. The mixed epithets
of two metaphors are combined as if in a single statement not
intended to be analysed but to convey a ' mood ' :
 
Night falls like fire ; the heavy lights run low,
And as they drop, my blood and body so
Shake as the flame shakes, full of days and hours
That sleep not neither weep they as they go.
 
Ah yet would God this flesh of mine might be
Where air might wash and long leaves cover me,
Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers,
Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea.
 
(Laus Veneris.)
 
' The coming of night is like the falling of fire ' ; the sun becomes
a red, glowing, exhausted ball on the horizon, day is going out,
the fire, as it burns down, glows hotter, and all the heat natural
to the firmament is being brought down (as if the ceiling was
weighing on me) and crushed into my temples. But when the
flame shakes our attention is transferred to a lamp ; it is lighting-
up time; the indoor Victorian-furnished Venusberg becomes
hotter, stuffier and more enclosed, more irritating to sick head-
ache and nervous exhaustion, and the gas-jet will have to be
popping from now on. Or the flame may be a symbolical candle ;
it gutters in its socket which, low in its last struggles, it scorches,
and rises and falls in popping and jerking disorder, like the
throbbing and swooning of headache, and casts leaping and
threatening shadows on the walls. Full, because it has ended the
 
 
 
164 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
time it is capable of, and because in its shaking it seems to be
measuring seconds, magnified by a sickbed fixity of attention into
hours; not sleeping or weeping, because of the poet's insomnia and
emotional exhaustion, because of its contrast with, and indiffer-
ence to, his weeping and the approaching sleep of his death, and
because, in the story, this mood is fixed into an eternity outside
the human order, in which tears are pointless, and the peace even
of death unattainable. 1
 
In the next verse, air might wash, like water, and leaves might
cover, like the sea or the grave; then by direct implication grass
and flowers are compared to waves; then the wind's feet shining
along the sea, whitening the tops of the waves, is compared, the
other way round, to grass and flowers, and, as a fainter implick-
tion, to grassy mounds with white tombstones on them. The
sea, in Swinburne, shares with earth the position of great sweet
mother, is cleaner, fresher, and more definitely dead. Nor must
one forget the feet, so beautiful upon the mountains, of him that
brings good tidings of the Lord.
 
When Swinburne comes off he is a very full and direct
writer; it is no use saying these verses show interest in mere
sound, or pattern of verbal cadence. It would be true, perhaps,
to say that he feels it more important to keep up his effect of
texture than that, in any particular case, the meanings, the chord
of associations, should come through. But in a literary, not
perhaps in a stage, sense, this hypnotised detachment is a power-
ful dramatic weapon. The various impulses when Tannhauser is
before the Pope in Laus Veneris; his wish for help, and hopeless-
ness, his impression that something kind was said (as if he knew
it ought to have been, or heard later of the miracle, or simply the
reader knew that the miracle occurred) and yet that * perhaps it
can't have been said, I know I heard him tell me not to seek mercy
till the rod budded/ and the further hopelessness justifying the
dramatic accident (which embodies it) of his never hearing of the
miracle, 'what if it does bud, it would be a stranger thing for me
to change my nature (even though, if I could change it, I might
yet obtain mercy)' all this, by the very disorder of memory
 
1 The first verse belongs to this chapter all right, but it is Ihe second
verse which gives a straightforward example of Swinburne's u"se of mutual
comparison.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 165
 
implied in the technique itself, is passed as a single unit into the
reader's mind.
 
There is a kind of working model (from its bare simplicity and
efficiency) of this technique in the famous chorus of Atalanta in
Calydon :
 
Time with a gift of tears
Grief with a glass that ran.
 
This f pretends to be two elements of a list with their attributes
muddled, but is in fact a mutual comparison between the water-
clock and the tearbottle.
 
People are oddly determined to regard Swinburne as an ex-
ponent of Pure Sound with no intellectual content. As a matter
of technique, his work is full of such dissolved and contrasted
reminiscences as need to be understood ; as a matter of content,
his sensibility was of the intellectual sort which proceeds from a
process of analysis. His view of the relations between sadism
and normal sexuality, for instance, whether or not it is particu-
larly realistic, is always being laid before the reader (by con-
trasted adjectives and so forth) as if he understood it himself by
very intellectual means. So careful have his readers been not to
analyse him that I might almost quote
 
All shrines that were vestal are flameless,
 
But flame has not fallen from this (Dolores )
 
as an example of a subdued pun ; though in itself it is a perfectly
solid metaphysical conceit.
 
I believe, then, that later English poetry is full of subdued
conceits and ambiguities, in the sense that a reader has to know
what the pun which establishes a connection would have been if
it had been made, or has to be accustomed to conceits in poetry,
so that, though a conceit has not actually been worked out, he can
feel it as fundamental material, as the justification of an apparent
disorder. In the same way such poetry will often imply a direc-
tion 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 exampfte was destroying.
 
But, of course, even if it be true that the nineteenth-century
 
 
 
166 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
technique was arrived at, historically speaking, in this way, sc
that it is in part the metaphysical tradition dug up when rotten,
still that is no reason to think there is no other way to read it,
One might deduce from what I have said that Shelley could onlj
be enjoyed by persons intimately acquainted with the past historj
of English poetry, which is far from true. And, for other reasons,
it would be hard to make the statement good, to map out such
effects, or to show that they were important when you had done
so; I can only hope that my last examples will have made it
plausible. It may, however, be illuminating to approach the
matter historically, and show how the later metaphysical poets
came to take the conceit for granted, came to blur its sharp edge
till they were writing something like nineteenth-century poetry.
There is a sort of mental association which gains strength
because it has been crystallised into a pun elsewhere; thus
Marvell's phrase about Charles the First
 
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene ;
But with his keener eye
 
The Axes edge did try ; , rr ^ , .
 
6 J ' (Horatian Ode.)
 
seems to be remembering the Latin acies, 'eyesight* and 'sharp
edge.' Crashaw's phrase about the Virgin and Child,
 
She 'gainst those Mother -Diamonds tryes
The points of her young Eagles' Eyes,
 
may rely on the same association, but at a further remove as the
word axe is not used. You may say that the resulting poetry is
not dependent on this word ; whether on the reader's knowledge
of it or on his belief that it existed. But even so it may be de-
pendent on his making the association which had produced the
word, and which the word itself had then strengthened.
 
A similar situation occurs within the English language when
a word has contracted in meaning since its use in a poem :
 
[a successful lover is happy]
But soon those Flames do lose their light
Like Meteors of a Summer's night.
Nor can they to that region climb t
 
To make impression upon Time. _
 
(MARVBLL, The Unfortunate Lover.)
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 167
 
Impression meant an assault, a meteor, and the noxious effects of
the night air, as well as the modern meaning which gives 'to
make time take some notice of them and be respectful.' Thus the
word originally read as a pun, whereas it now seems a subdued
conceit, in itself flat and puzzling, but to which we have been
made accustomed by a later fashion. This is rather interesting,
because it suggests that it was a change in the language itself, a
limitation of its ambiguity, which produced the later fashion;
poetry came automatically to be read in a different way. It is
less fanciful to point out that, after the word had altered, the
poetry, though read in a different way, remained substantially the
same; you have now in some degree to invent the subsidiary
meanings of impression for yourself, but this is not impossible.
'Time is a Platonic idea lodged in the highest heaven, whereas
meteors can only reach the lowest of the spheres ; in the same
way the fires of love, though they are not denied to be heavenly,
yet cannot snatch from the more exalted heavens any of that
immortality, any of those powers over fate, which by being
heavenly they seem to claim, and which since they are heavenly
many people claim for them.' Climb and the context force the
meaning 'assault' on to impression; what is lost is the wit, and
the courage which could be witty when it was saying such a
thing, of the meaning ' meteor.' (It was always, of course, in the
background; it would not make sensible grammar.)
 
It is tactful, when making an obscure reference, to arrange
that the verse shall be intelligible even when the reference is not
understood. Thus many conceits are prepared to be treated as
subdued conceits, though in themselves they have been fully
worked out. Consider as the simplest kind of example
 
The brotherless Heliades
 
Melt in such amber tears as these.
 
(MARVELL, The Nymph Complaining.)
 
If you have forgotten, as I had myself, who their brother was,
and look it up, the poetry will scarcely seem more beautiful ; such
of the myth as is wanted is implied. It is for reasons of this sort
that poetry has so much equilibrium, and is so much less depend-
ent on ^otes than one would suppose. But something has
happened tfter you have looked up the Heliades; the couplet
 
 
 
168 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
has been justified. Marvell has claimed to make a classical refer-
ence and it has turned out to be all right; this is of importance,
because it was* only because you had faith in MarvelPs classical
references that you felt as you did, that this mode of admiring
nature seemed witty, sensitive, and cultured. If you had ex-
pected, or if you had discovered, that Marvell had made the
myth up, the couplet might still be admired but the situation
would be different; for instance, you would want the brother to
be more relevant to the matter in hand. Lyly continually invents
fabulous beasts for his own stylistic convenience, and this gives
him a childish, didactic, and exquisite air, merely because one
gives his statements an unusual degree of disbelief. This is, of
course, legitimate, and in an odd way courtly, because it treats
the reader as a patron of learning without threatening to assume
things that he ought already to know. More definitely it is a
colloquial or prose device, intended to convey its point at a single
reading; all that is relevant about the beast must be said at once,
because from the nature of the case it is impossible to find out
any more about him. But from a writer whose references are to
be relied upon one expects a use of them which will repay study;
one expects a simile with reserves of meaning and at any rate
the first type of ambiguity.
 
I have suggested here a few ways in which conceits might
become vaguer than they need be; I shall now consider a couple
of vague conceits by Marvell, which fall below the standard of
precision that the metaphysicals set themselves, and try to explain
how in effect they are so powerful. One difficulty about this is
that I must assume they are peculiar, whereas the history of
English literature has been such that to a modern reader they will
seem more normal than the style from which they diverge. I
must try, then, to show also that lines which approach towards
the nineteenth-century 'simplicity' are, in fact, more complicated
than the normal metaphysical conceit, though their machinery
and its strangeness are less insistent, and though they move as
though something simple was being conveyed. Marvell is a
convenient person for this plan ; as a metaphysical poet who had
not forgotten the Elizabethans he is sensitive to a variety of
influences, and one can watch the conceit at the beginning of its
decay. From the elegy for the death of the Lord Hdstings:
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 169
 
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.
 
An extreme, a direct, an unambiguous beauty wells up in these
lines; the young man has died on the eve of his wedding; night
has fallen. But apparently this is conveyed by comparing some
funeral custom with something, possibly astronomical, seen in
the sky; the mood of comparison is caught before it has worked
itself out; instead of the sharp conceit at which Marvell excelled
we * are given the elements which were to have been fitted to-
gether, but flowing out, and associated only loosely into an
impression of sorrow ; something, perhaps something very apoca-
lyptic and reassuring, seems to have been meant, but we cannot
think of it ; and a veil of tenderness is cast over the dissatisfaction
of the mind.
 
This impression, that it is a Romantic Revival piece of writing,
is given by regarding Marvell as one of the metaphysical poets,
and then failing to find their particular sort of precision in his
methods. But if you regard him as a disciple of Milton, there is
nothing indefinite about the image ; saffron is merely the colour
of a marriage, purple of a mourning, robe ; you are meant to see
Hymen, an allegorical figure, performing a simple symbolical
movement, with all his stock epithets about him. It is no longer
necessary to interpret the first two lines, so that they mean 'night
fell and the stars came out,' the gods appear as in a story about
them. No doubt Milton or Spenser would have intended the
epithets to be beautiful for a variety of reasons, but such extra
meanings would be grouped loosely about an allegory to be
imagined in its own terms. It would not be necessary (as it is
if you expect a conceit) to wonder whether Hymen has any
official standing as a star, or whether he has become identified
with the sun for a moment, or how this could be justified; or to
remember that Hymen, even when unshadowed by the darkness
of death, was beloved of Vesper, and impatient for the nightfall.
But then again, it is easier to feel that Marvell is describing a
sunset watched alone in the open than the picture of a concretely
 
 
 
170 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
imagined mythological figure; one feels, for some reason, that
he has observed intensely what he has described only in this
cursory and uRplausible way, as yellow deepening into purple,
above a horizon of black with red isolated flares. The lines have
thus a curious and impalpable form of ambiguity, in that they
are drawing their energy from three different literary conven-
tions at once.
 
Only they drooping Hymeneus note,
 
Who for sad Purple, tears his Saffron coat,
 
Whatever he may be, he is considered in the puzzled and fanciful
way that one reserves for foreigners and the natural world ; we
must watch patiently the strange pageant of his actions and force
upon them any interpretation we can imagine. Only means from
the point of view of the allegory ' the only thing that prevents
their perfect rejoicing,' but as a matter of nature-study only the
brightest stars, and they not fully unveiled, can be there to note
the solemn celebrations of the nightfall. The next line contrasts
its active and vehement verb tears with the 'tears' of weeping,
then pronounced the same way (and the coats of a sunset are
indeed formed of its tears), with the inactive sorrow of drooping,
with the ritual dignity of the mythological figure, and with the
slow far-reaching gradations of the colour-changes in the sky.
If the saffron and purple noted by stars are indeed a sunset (we are
not told so) there is another quieting influence from the sun's
regularity; from a sense that he may safely reverse his operations
(dangerous and extravagant as this seems with most sorts of
torch) in that his setting is only the reversal of his rising; from
a sense of order and perhaps of resurrection in the death of the
hero.
 
And trails his Torches through the Starry Hall
 
Reversed, at his Darling's Funeral.
 
Hymen may always trail his torches, and on this occasion be trail-
ing them, with no less pomp, reversed', or he may at this painful
news be trailing them in the sense of dragging them behind him,
extinguished, not being used for anything, in his dejection. In
either case the torches have to be interpreted as something to do
with the sunset, something up in the sky, like the vtars; they
must be the same sort of thing, or why is it consideifed so striking
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 171
 
that they should be different ? Torches when reversed are liable
to go out, smoke more, and are wasting themselves; never are
they less like the perfect or eternal stars] and in that we find them
up in the sky we are set free ourselves, with a sense of being
made at home in the sunset, to float out into the upper air. 1
 
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 a beauty, which seem so little tortured by the intellect,
which are, in fact, early work, and rather carelessly phrased. 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 ex-
planations.
 
A very similar effect, again produced by blurring of the meta-
physical conceit, comes in Marvell's poem on Eyes and Tears. 2
The funeral elegy on Lord Hastings moved rather in the world
of Milton, whereas these verses are excellent and complete con-
ceits, so that here there is no doubt the crux must be approached
from the metaphysical point of view.
 
How wisely Nature did decree,
With the same Eyes to weep and see.
That, having viewed the object vain,
They might be ready to complain.
 
And, since the Self-deluding Sight
In a false Angle takes each hight ;
These tears that better measure all,
Like wat'ry Lines and Plummets fall.
 
1 I have cut nearly two pages of this analysis for the second edition, and
indeed feel that the whole chapter is verbose. It seemed hard to make the
points convincingly without evocative writing.
 
2 I now think this example a mare's nest not in the details of the analysis
but in the uaim that they amount to a blurring of the conceit. It is true,
however, I thlik, that the lines would easily be enjoyed by nineteenth-
century critics who thought conceits merely quaint.
 
 
 
i 7 2 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
It is among such verses as these that one finda :
 
What in the World most fair appears,
Yea, even Laughter, turns to tears;
And all the Jewels which we prize
Melt in these pendants of the Eyes.
 
The chief impression here surely is not one of neatness but of
parts which do not quite fit; and since the verse 'carries it off'
with such an air of gracious achievement the mind is bluired and
puzzled into a reflective state, and the second couplet sticks in
your head. Jewels, of course, are relevant as typical of what
appears most fair, as a symbol of the lust of the eye; but why or
how does a jewel melt in a pendant ? The definiteness of the good
conceit suddenly escapes us, and yet it is no use saying this pro-
duces a failure of the poetry; on the contrary, the lines seem
suddenly to have become more serious and generalised.
 
Melt in may mean ' become of no account beside tears,' or ' are
made of no account by tears/ or ' dissolve so that they themselves
become tears/ or 'are dissolved by tears so that the value which
was before genuinely their own has now been assumed by and
resides in tears.' Tears from this become valuable in two ways,
as containing the value of the jewels (as belonging to the world of
Cleopatra and hectic luxury) and as being one of those regal
solvents that are competent to melt jewels (as belonging to the
world of alchemists and magical power). Which suggests, more
than 'that' would have done, that not all jewels are prized, and
only those prized melt in, or into, pendants. Eked out by this, but
independent of it, there is a hint that it is eyes, especially a loved
woman's, which shine and are jewels', why should eyes have
pendants, the word prompts us, if they are not jewels themselves ?
Eyes, too, are brightest when suffused with tears, not for shed-
ding, and of happiness; which yet, says the poet, shall fall from
their jewel, turn to sorrow, and become pendants.
 
Thus we have now some more meanings for melt in : ' in the
melting of these eyes into pendants, which is a type of the world,
we see the melting of all jewels into nothing, or into lesser stones
of no value/ or 'in that these pendants coming from her eyes
melt, and turn out to be water, we see that there is no perman-
ence in those values that flow from the sources of the world/
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 173
 
or ' her eyes have been jewels with tendernQgs, but such jewels
melt; those tears shall fall and be despair.'
 
One may notice that the jewels which we prize ate thought of
as Eyes all the more easily because, in so far as they are not, the
most striking thing about the reflection made by the couplet is
that it is so untrue :
 
that jewel in your ear ...
Shall last to be a precious stone
When all your world of beauty's gone,
 
(GAREW.)
 
represents not only the facts of the case but the more usual
sentiment about it; and the couplet makes up for its lack of
* wit'* by the claim on one's attention contained in its paradox.
But the reason that this claim seems justified, as the verse enters
the mind, is that it contains the materials of many true conceits,
pruned into the background, left vague, and packed closely.
 
The reader may plausibly object that a poet cannot expect his
readers to make up conceits for themselves, and that, in so far
as I have been doing so, I have been making up a poem of my
own. But no, I have been quoting; what is assumed by these
verses is a wide acquaintance on the part of the reader with the
conceits about tears that have been already made.
 
Perhaps I have overstated the extent to which the conceit has
been dissolved in this example; the one about Lord Hastings,
I think, has no simple point, but in this case the idea of a jewel
melting in a tear is sharp enough, and carries most of the feeling
But, even if you regard it as a simple and successful conceit,
there are yet crowding at its back this multitude of associations,
taking effect in a different way, which are almost as strong as the
main conceit and threaten to displace it in the mind or at least
make it unnecessary. 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. If
the previous example from Marvell was the bursting of the con-
ceit, this is its final and most mellow ripeness, the skin thin and
stretched to its utmost, the seeds ready to be scattered. By the
last example of this chapter it has been made into jam.
 
The distinction may not seem clear between this example and,
say, Donne's Valediction in the last chapter. There one had to
 
 
 
174 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
accept a conceit. by itself, and the ambiguities to be discovered
were deductions from it : whether as to the reasons which must
justify its implied comparison or as to the judgments which
would make those reasons valid. I put the result into the fourth
type because of the ordered complexity of judgment which the
ambiguities of language implied. Here the conceit is only one
element in the total effect, may indeed be no more than the fa9ade
which holds the effect together and makes it seem sensible ; the
ambiguities are to be discovered in more or less disorderly re-
actions between the words themselves, and I put it in the fifth
type as a case of fruitful disorder.
 
Vaughan, as the disciple of Herbert, and precursor of Words-
worth, naturally employs in the same way this swoon of the
conceit into the suggestion of conceits, into this vaguer and
apparently more direct, more evocative and sensory, mode of
appeal. The following pantheistic quatrain, for instance, is at
once wit and nature-study.
 
So hills and valleys into singing break ;
And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,
While active winds and streams both run and speak,
Yet stones are deep in admiration. (The Bird )
 
Compared to speech and speak, tongue and run seem to be paired
by sound rather than by sense ; till one remembers that tongues
may be said to 'run on,' and that streams possess tongues in that
they are running. It is by means of this verbal echo, which last-
century critics would have regarded as a matter of Pure Sound,
that the subdued puns are passed into the mind. And deep may
refer to speechlessness, or to the solid rock which is below the
soil; so that the verse as a whole is in part a conceit upon stones
in general, as one of the four elements; in part, as evocative
description, it gives the boulders on the hillside, struck dumb in
the presence of the precipices, and in a giant silence waiting for
their fall.
 
Put on, put on, your best array,
 
Let the joyed road make holiday,
 
And flowers, that into hills do stray,
 
Or secret groves, keep the highway.
 
(Palm Junday).
Parts of nature outcast and retiring, like Jesus, are to be brought,
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 175
 
on this day of his showing forth, into the agora. On the one
hand, there is a conceit on the connection of nature and the cult-
hero; on the other, an implied description t>f the solitary
wanderings of the Christ.
 
Such was the bright world, on the first seventh day,
Before man brought forth sin, or sin decay. . . .
When Heaven above them shined like molten glass
While all the planets did unclouded pass,
And springs, like dissolved pearls, their streams did pour,
Ne'er marred with floods, nor angered with a shower.
 
(Ascension Day.)
 
On the one hand, it is an exalted and sensuous view of nature;
on 'the other, perhaps from the gong-like note as of Dryden,
which suggests a more precise and striking interpretation, we feel
that before the Fall the whole mechanism of the spheres, a
celestial orrery, a circumterrestrial clockwork, was seen going in
the sky. It is these evanescent but powerful suggestions (like
Milton's two-handed engine) that Vaughan gains by blurring the
outline and losing the energy of the conceit of Herbert.
 
And in this last example the fading multiplicity of the conceit
seems to have glimmered out of sight altogether. ' He trembles/
said Johnson, 'upon the brink of meaning.'
 
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.
 
( l jy of my life while left me here')
 
One does not separate them in one's mind; it is the Romantic
Movement's technique ; dark hair, tidal water, landscape at 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.
 
 
 
VI
 
AN ambiguity of the sixth type occurs when a statement says
XA. 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. We have
already considered examples of contradiction which yield a direct
meaning, and these might be regarded as in this class ; thus Moses,
according to the Authorised Version, told the Lord that ' Thou
hast not delivered thy people at all,' but ' Delivering thou hast not
delivered ' is the more direct translation in the margin. ' Though
you said you would/ or 'No doubt from your point of view you
are delivering us all the time, but it does not seem much to us/
or ' I do not presume to say you are not delivering your people,
but I find myself puzzled and unable to say that you are/ In
Hebrew this, presumably, is a polite idiom, and cannot fairly be
put into the sixth type because its meaning is not in any doubt;
the device is in a sense real and active, but it is not conceived as
a contradiction.
 
Contradictions of the same kind, however, when they are used
as jokes, fall more definitely into this type, because the reader is
meant to be conscious of them as such. The paragraph which
describes the appearance of Zuleika Dobson is a pretty example.
 
Zuleika was not strictly beautiful.
 
* Do not suppose that she was anything so commonplace; do not
suppose that you can easily imagine what she was like, or that she
was not, probably, the rather out-of-the-way type that you par-
ticularly admire' ; in this way (or rather, in the gambit of which
this is a parody) jealousy is placated, imagination is set free, and
nothing has been said (what is this strict type of beauty, anyway ?)
which can be used against the author afterwards.
 
Her eyes were a trifle large, and the lashes longer than they
need have been.
 
Not knowing how large the trifle may be, the reader has no means
of being certain whether he would be charmed or appalled. ' To
me, from an academic point of view, this face is all wrong; but
 
176
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 177
 
never mind me, boys; don't let me spoil your fun.' Her brow
was not discreditable', her hair, we are positively told, was curly.
'I must say I find something very excessive abou"t all this; but
you, of course, would have been impressed.'
 
The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid's bow.
 
He is becoming petulant; after not strictly beautiful it is no kind-
ness to construct her out of familiar models \ the flashy-looking
creature had the same face as every one else, only twice as much
of it. The eulogy now rises out of apparent understatement into
warm but ambiguous praise :
 
No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any
Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson's cheeks. Her
neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean
proportions. She had no waist to speak of.
 
The negatives in the first sentence throw a prim pattern over its
lush fullness, force one to think 'no, the tree had not,' and give
it, as a doubt in the background, exactly the opposite meaning,
as by an Italian or vulgar-English double negative. In the
second, of course, her neck could only imitate marble, but was it
imitating imitation-marble ? the doubt reminds us of the appalling
possibilities in imitating many perfectly genuine marbles, and
perhaps of the imitation-marble environment of her early struggles.
And then, since mean may be medium, small or without quality;
since a waist is at once flesh and the absence of flesh ; we are left
in doubt whether the last two sentences mean that her beauty was
unique and did not depend on the conventional details, or that
these parts of her body were, in fact, not good enough to be worth
mentioning, or that they were intensely and fashionably small.
 
This contradiction as to the apparent subject of the statement
seems very complete; it is not obvious what we are meant to
believe at the end of it. But it cannot be said to represent a con-
flict in the author's mind ; the contradiction removes the reader
from the apparent subject to the real one, and the chief ' meaning *
of the paragraph, apart from the criticism in its parody, is 'please
believe in my story; we have got to take it sufficiently seriously
to keep it going.' I hope I need not apologise, after this example,
for including Mr. Beerbohm among the poets.
 
I shall consider what may reasonably be called two ambiguities
M
 
 
 
178 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
by contradiction, in the love scene between Troilus and Cressida ;
but one must speak in this tentative way because, when readers
can easily extract meaning from a sentence, there is a sort of
irrelevance about saying that its main grammar has none; the
fact might be true but not important. And I said that a reader
should be conscious of a contradiction if it is to be of the sixth
type ; but in complex cases the reader is not so much conscious
of the contradiction as of the way it fails so as to have meaning.
Thus the contradictions are likely to be well embedded in their
setting, and not of a simplicity suitable for demonstration.
 
Partly conscious of the difference between them, and feeling
that she must bid for his sympathy, Cressida begins the scene by
giving herself away; she has always wanted Troilus, she held off
'lest he would play the tyrant/ to lengthen the time of wooing
when at least she was definitely wanted, and make as sure of him
as possible. It is said in the hope that he, too, will turn out to be
a conscious and calculating person, living not by one consistent
ideal but by the manipulation of several; she is not sure how
much she is saying, or how much she can afford to say. It leads
her to confusion, shame at her lack of simplicity, and an innocent
fear that she has been trying to take advantage of him (helplessly,
having got into the wrong style, she confesses that too) when he
remains noble and romantic, silent and puzzled; when she is
answered only by that heroic loyalty which will so easily turn to
contempt of her, which springs from a secret belief that one can
get anything one sets one's heart on, which poor Cressida, in the
humility of her opportunism, can echo only in her tantrums.
She tries to get away from him.
 
TRO. What offends you Lady ?
CRESS. Sir, mine owne company.
TRO. You cannot shun your selfe.
CRESS. Let me goe and try:
 
I have a kinde of selfe recides with you :
 
But an unkinde selfe, that it selfe will leave,
 
To be anothers foole. Where is my wit?
 
I would be gone : I speake I know not what.
TRO. Well know they what they speak, that speak so wisely.
 
(in. ii. 141.)
 
They are wise too who know what has been spoken. c I call it a
contradiction on the assumption that the kinde of selfe which is
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 179
 
fixed is the same as the unkinde selfe which will leave \ the pun
amounts to one contradiction, the two statements as to mobility
another, and there is a third as to whether she*has left herself
already or is trying to do so now. She may mean : ' I can leave
myself since I have done so already ; part of me has gone over to
your side, and is unkind to me because it makes me talk so
foolishly/ or 'the self I have given you is unkind because it is
able to leave you, able to retire into its own privacy, able to take
another lover.' But we may also regard the two selves as differ-
ent; the point of the paradox is the assumption of difference
within a term dedicated to unity. 'Part of me will always be
fixed in you ; but I have also an unkind self which does not know
what it is about, wants to leave the kind self with you for the
moment and get away to be alone.' This needs a further inter-
pretation of another* s fool. I think she feels 'Part of me I have
already given you ; but there is another part of me which I am
unnaturally trying to give as well; I have been trying to submit
myself to you more than I have the generosity to do ; I have been
trying to obtain a greater intimacy from you than you have the
wit to sustain.' Hence, 'I have an ungenerous self which will
cease to be ungenerous by becoming another's fool, when I
submit myself wholly to a lover ' ; or remembering the fool was
a domestic critic, ' I have a store of unkindness in me which may
yet be brought out against you to mock at you.'
 
Perchance my Lord, I shew more craft then love,
And fell so roundly to a large confession,
To Angle for your thoughts : but you are wise,
Or else you love not : for to be wise and love,
Exceedes mans might, that dwels with gods above.
 
I call this second example, following on from the first, a con-
tradiction, because the generalisation which is added to show the
force of the antithesis makes it a false one. 'Either you are wise
or you do not love, because you cannot love if you are wise.'
There is some difference between the alternatives, so that the
antithesis is not actually illogical; if a man is wise we know he
does not love, but if he does not love the dictum tells us nothing
as to whether or not he is wise. Logically, then, the force of or
else is ' at afty^rate ' ; she moves down to a less sweeping deduction
from his silence. But this is far-fetched, and the remark has an
 
 
 
i8o SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
air of saying something directly; perhaps one takes or else to
mean 'in other words, 5 and the generalisation as a statement that
the two things f are much the same. But since the two things are,
in fact, placed as alternatives, we are forced to see that there is
some doubt about the matter, and put a double interpretation
upon both love and wisdom.
 
You are wise, 'you love in the wholesale, self-dedicating, self-
careless (because self-confident) way approved by theory'; you
are wise (with admiring reproach) ' because, loving as I clo, you
will not confess it.' Wise means 'single-minded,' as one speaks
of the wisdom of the beasts, or ' careful to appear so, and not to
give yourself away'; perhaps, also, 'too well-balanced to be
conscious of your duplicities.' Love is a heroic and selfless, or a
pathetically unscrupulous passion. Or else you love not, ' If you
are not so wise as to love simply you cannot love me at all, for no
one could both love and be too politic to confess his complexity.'
Or else you love not, ' If you are not keeping silent only out of
caution you cannot love me at all, for no one could both love and
be simple ; when you are really in love you cannot afford to be
heroic and single-minded.' (If either of these meanings is there,
both must be, because there is no reason why the two meanings
should be distributed one way rather than the other.) She feels
that, in one way or another, he must be very wise, if only by
contrast with her own folly in talking to him as she has done.
 
The main logical structure of this exquisite song 1 is a contrast;
take, but bring; which involves a contradiction; and there is
another in the idea of 'returning' a kiss :
 
Take, oh take thy lips away,
 
That so sweetly were forsworne,
And those eyes : the break of day
 
Lights that doe mislead the Morne ;
But my kisses bring againe,
 
bring againe,
 
Seals of love, but seal'd in vaine,
seal'd in vaine.
 
In that he must take his lips away he is already in her presence ;
she is actually telling him to go, and keeping command of the
situation; or if he is only present in her imagination, because she
 
1 It is sung for Mariana in the moated grange (Measure for Measure, Act. iv. i.)
and so I assumed that the forswearer was a man, not a woman.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 181
 
cannot forget him, still the source of her fantasy satisfaction is
to pretend that he is already in her presence, that she is in a
position to repel him, or pretend to repel him ; and her demand
would be satisfied both by an expression of her resentment and
by a forgetting of her desire. But he cannot be in her presence
already, because he must come and bring again her kisses; and
thus, when he is not present, she confesses that she wants more
of them. But, again (if perhaps he is present, and she is sending
him bick to fetch the things), he must not bring her new kisses,
but only her old ones back, so as to restore her to her original
unkissed condition. Notice that the metaphor from seals does
not keep up this last pretence, which seems to be her main
meaning; it is no more use giving back a seal when it has been
broken than a kiss when you wish to revoke your kisses. It is
these two contradictions, in short, which convey the ambivalence
of her feeling for him. (And yet, after all, it is no use calling this
a serious contradiction; we know what her total feelings are
well enough.) 1
 
One can extract minor contradictions from the imagery.
Either at the break of day : at dawn she can again see his beauty;
in the morning he leaves her harshly and forgets his vows. Or
like the break of day : he must take his eyes away even though,
when they come, they give her world all the light it can now hope
for; and in that they are like the sun of a day, one ought always
to have expected that they would soon be taken. I think, too,
there is a pun on break which gives it two opposite actions upon
day] their coming is like daybreak because they restore her
happiness, but he must take them away because they broke into,
or broke up, the easy clarity of her carelessness; because they
broke her heart either with their first beauty or with their final
harshness; and the word still hints, under all these muffling
associations, at the loss of her virginity. They mislead the morn
is in main idea a simple hyperbole; 'when your eyes arrive at a
place nature thinks it is the sun rising.' But mislead is a word
already well suited to the situation ; she was herself in a state of
morning before he came to her, because of her youth, freshness,
and lack of experience; just as she was day in the previous line,
*
 
1 It is cleat? I think, that the song turns the conflict of feeling entirely ' into
poetry,' however much you regard the ambiguity as inherently a dramatic one.
 
 
 
182 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
either when she was happy in his love for her, so that the promise
of her morning had been achieved, or before she met him, because
of her sanity, safety, understanding of her own feelings, and
freedom from the darkness of complex or unsatisfied desires.
 
One may call those statements contradictions which make the
reader reflect that they are untrue, or that they conflict with the
implications of the passage. Thus
 
Ah moon of my delight that knowest no wane,
The moon of heaven is rising once again ;
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same garden after me, in vain.
 
(Omar Khayyam.)
 
contains a contradiction; the point of the verse is the inevit-
ability of death, and the first line says that one or other of the
persons concerned is unchanging. (Fitzgerald seems to have
invented the clause about not waning, by the way; it does not
occur in some of the versions.) In part this is to be excused as
the super-imposition of two time-scales, in part as a compensa-
tion mechanism, which holds in mind an untruth in order to
find energy to recognise a truth. In part, I daresay, it should not
be excused at all.
 
In place of stating a contradiction it is often possible to ask a
question whose answer is both yes and no; this device is par-
ticularly frequent when an author is adopting a * poetical* style,
so that he often wants to say things of greater logical complexity
than his method will allow. It makes less parade of its com-
plexity than any other.
 
But who hath seen her wave her hand ?
Or at the casement seen her stand ?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
 
Yes and no. She is not known personally to anybody in all the
land, but everybody knows of her as a legend. Both these facts
heighten the dramatic effect, and they are both conveyed by the
single question.
 
Ambiguity of the sixth type by tautology (not by irrelevance)
is likely to fulfil the following rather exacting conditions : there
will be a pun which is used twice, once in each sensi, and the
massive fog of the complete ambiguity will then arise from a
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 183
 
doubt as to which meaning goes with which word. The follow-
ing example from Herbert is of this sort. One should start with
an earlier verse of the poem.
 
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.
 
(Affliction')
 
Long as Herbert delayed in taking orders, the two halves of this
verse, one saying he was betrayed into the life of contemplation,
the^ other that he was entangled in the life of action, show him
still doubtful which he would have preferred. Thus he seems
to want to change his life even now, but it is hard to see in what
direction. 1
 
Yet though thou troublest me, I must be meek;
 
In weakness must be stout.
Well, I will change the service, and go seek
 
Some other master out.
Ah, my dear God, though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
 
It is the last line which I call an ambiguity by tautology. In the
first line, meek may mean that he must endure what God puts
upon him; in the second, stout may mean that he must endure it
bravely. Thus the third line, which shows that both these words
carried some hint of revolt, is a surprise; we arrive in some
doubt at the final couplet.
 
Forgotten, either by God or the world, either now or later, in
consequence of seeking or of not seeking another master, of loving
or of not loving God. To make the last line sensible (able to use
these possible ambiguities), there must be some play, in the
engineering sense, on the word love\ or only, perhaps, some dis-
placement among the tenses. The only grammatical and sensible
variation of tense would make the first love future, the second
present: * If I have stopped loving you, let me go; do not make
me love you again in the future, so that I shall regret it if I return
 
to the world. Allow me to be consistent, even though it means
 
.
 
1 Probably the gown was Cambridge not the church ; he is recounting
his life.
 
 
 
184 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
an entire loss of your favour.' But one may also distinguish
between the love of God which is an arduous effort towards a
goal and the loye of God which has achieved its goal, which being
a mystical illumination has no doubts and is its own reward.
Allotting these meanings in the order given, we have : ' Do not
let me spend my life trying to love you, loving you in will and
deed but not in the calm of which so few are worthy. Do not
make me hanker after you if I would be better under some other
master elsewhere ; even though this would mean you must forget
me altogether.' It is a very reasonable deduction from the sexual
metaphor used by devotional poets that God should in most cases
be well scolded as a flirt; it seems always, however, to be done
in language as veiled as that of my example. But the meanings
may also be allotted the other way round : * And yet, though you
have already clean forgotten me, let me not love you in achieve-
ment if I do not love you in desire.' * Damn me if I don't stick
to the parsonage'; he has no worse imprecation than the first
part of the line, and it is used to give force to the statement of
purpose in the second. 1
 
There was an Archbishop Sharp who died with this couplet
on his lips, and indeed, to a mind trained by dividing the word
of God in the pulpit, to the febrile imagination, to the attention
limited on to words remembered, of a sickbed, they might well
open into extraordinary vistas of meaning. 2
 
Ambiguity of the sixth type by irrelevant statements maintains
a precarious existence between the first type and the seventh. It
is not merely a statement with various implications, but a state-
ment with various implications which conflict; nor is it an
essential contradiction, but a contradiction on matters not central
to the writer's interests at the moment, or a contradiction which
is thought of as capable of being resolved. Like the first type it
may be hunted among similes. Thus to say a thing is like gold
 
1 Mr. F. L. Lucas took this treatment of Herbert's poem as a proof of the
vulgarity of my whole mode of approach. No doubt it is flippantly written,
but a purely logical point can be made more clearly if it is not muffled by a
sympathetic tone. The matter I cannot understand anyone objecting to ;
the line seems to me so beautiful when it is interpreted as I do that I would
have picked out this passage as the only splendid and obvious success I had
had the good luck to achieve. <
 
* Be that as it may, the Archbishop was murdered and probably had
little time.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 185
 
may mean that it is glittering, strong, lifegiving, like the sun,
young, virtuous, untrammelled, like the Golden Age, expensive
and hence aristocratic, capable of being drawn And beaten into
delicate ornaments, a worthy setting for jewels; or it may mean
simply 'mercenary,' and a heavy symbol of wealth, suitable for
storage.
 
Then rose the seed of Chaos, and of Night,
To blot out order, and extinguish light,
Of dull and venal a new world to mould,
And bring Saturnian days of lead and gold.
 
(POPE, Dunciad.)
 
The Saturnian was the Golden Age ; Saturn was lead in astro-
logy. Gold is intended to have the two sorts of meaning I have
suggested, so that this is a fair example of the sixth type, in a
very simple form. Evidently the contradiction is capable of
being resolved; it is resolved into a joke. My next example is
in every sense more serious.
 
It is the Cause, it is the Cause (my soul),
Let me not name it to you, you chaste Starres,
It is the Cause. Yet He not shed her blood,
Nor scarre that whiter skin of hers, then Snow,
And smooth as Monumental Alabaster :
 
(Othello, v. ii.)
 
The stress may be on it or on cause; the capitals suggest the
latter. This favours Dr. Johnson's meaning: 'It is not the act
of murder that horrifies me here; it is the cause of it.' But
regarding the stress as on it (an actor should stress both) we are
made to wonder what it was that was causing the tempest in his
mind; and are given only the 'irrelevant' statement that it was
the cause. If it is necessary to find one word for what was in his
mind, I should myself plump for blood; but it is no use assuming,
for the ease of mind of the chaste stars of criticism, that one cause
can be assigned, and one thing it is the cause of. There is no
primary meaning for lack of information, and the secondary
meaning, therefore, holds the focus of consciousness, that we are
listening to a mind withdrawn upon itself, and baffled by its own
agonies. As primary meanings of it, however, thus thrust back
among tht? assumptions, one might list his blackness, as causing
her defection ; the universality of human lust (in both him and
 
 
 
i86 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
her), as causing her defection and his murder; her defection, as
 
causing his horror and her death.
 
Yet Othello *will not shed her blood, because that would be to
display the animal now latent in her and be like the taking of a
virginity. If she is chaste, it would be to stain her with the blood
hidden even in her; if she is guilty but pitiful, it would be in-
delicately to display the hypocrisy of her beauty, which ought in
decency, like a tombstone, to be preserved; if she is guilty, it
would be to stain Othello himself with the blood in Desdemona,
which is so new a horror to him. Before calling this fantastic
one must consider how many other hints of that symbolism can
be found in the course of the death-scene ; the marriage-sheets
which were to be laid on the bed; 'Aye, but not yet to die';
Othello's phrase about 'plucking the rose'; and the sword
stolen from him as an emblem of cuckoldry. It is as a sort of
parody of the wedding night, I think, that the scene is given its
horror and Othello's violence is made to seem inevitable. But
independently of this latent comparison in the whole scene,
which different people will absorb in different ways, the meaning
of the particular line depends on Elizabethan associations with
blood; Webster may have been remembering it when he made
the White Devil say it the other way round :
 
Oh, my worst sin was in my blood ;
 
Now my blood pays for it. (v. vi.)
 
It is the same doubt, expressed by a similar 'irrelevance/
which gives their extraordinary quality to the next two lines. In
the line praising the skin of the creature he is enjoying the
straightforward relief of a Marlowan hyperbole, so as to give
himself strength by reviving what she had meant to him; he
escapes for a moment the clash between love and hatred by an
irrelevant praise about which he has no doubt, so that the effect
is as if he thought her innocent. In the line about the tombstone
the rhythm takes on a hushed and reflective horror, and mutters
like the talk of vergers down an aisle; 'It is fearful that her
beauty should be such a lie ; it almost makes one doubt the whole
story; under the calm of this efligy (already judged) one looks
for an inscription accusing her murderer, and yet \yitfnin it is all
uncleanness and already rotten.'
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 187
 
You might say that this is a fundamental indecision on the
point at issue, and should be put into the seventh type. But the
point at issue is as to whether he will kill her* and there the
decision is already made. Taking this for granted, so that it
overshadows the speech, he is trying to believe it, trying to order
his feelings about her in accordance with it, trying to make it
seem tolerable in his mind.
 
The strength of vagueness, in fact, is that it allows of secret
ambiguity; it seems to have forced itself on nineteenth-century
poets when they felt they needed ambiguity, but would have
considered its more discoverable forms improper. If I may once
more attempt to give reasons for this fact, it may spring from
their respect for logical punctuation, from their admiration for
simple ecstasies (it was no longer courtiers and administrators
who wrote poetry), from their resulting admiration for smooth-
ness of lyrical flow, and from the fact that the language had
become less fluid, a less subtle mirror of the mind (though a
more precise mirror of the scientific world), since the clarifying
labours of the eighteenth century. This cult of vagueness
produced the nonsense writers like Lear and Lewis Carroll (the
Carpenter was a Castle; the Walrus, who could eat so many
more oysters because he was crying into his handkerchief, was a
Bishop, in the chessboard scheme. It was the cult of vagueness
which saved their extraordinary author from thinking himself a
satirist); and the dowagers of Oscar Wilde's plays, who by the
gentle indifference of their vagueness could give insults beside
which violence must pale. My next example shows the extreme
beauty which such a technique can sustain.
 
One of the finest poems of W. B. Yeats is an example of an
ambiguity of the sixth type, under the sub-heading * irrelevant
statements.'
 
Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore ?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fears no more.
 
oAnd no more turn aside and brood
Upon Love's bitter mystery;
 
 
 
i88 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
A|\d the white breast of the dim sea,
And all dishevelled wandering stars.
 
There is another poem in the volume explaining about Fergus.
He appears as a king, who has left the judgment-hall, and the
pleasures of the Court, and the chariot races by the seashore,
who has grown weary of active life, and has sought out a Druid
to be given the bag of dreams. The Druid warns him triat
 
No woman loves me, no man seeks my help,
Because I be not of the things I dream.
 
Fergus, insisting, is given the dreams and awakes to what tiiey
imply, the intellectual or contemplative life, so that
 
now I am grown nothing, being all,
And the whole world weighs down upon my heart,
 
and so that he cries out
 
Ah ! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow
Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured bag !
 
One may notice the way a foreign idiom is implied by the two
uses of how: 'how great were the webs' and 'how the webs of
sorrow lay hidden.'
 
The first poem, of course, assumes this story, but now may
mean before or after the transformation. If after, the first line
means: 'Now that the awful example of Fergus is in front of
you, surely you will not be so unwise as to brood?'; to drive
with him would be to wander through the woods like a ghost, as
he does ; the dancing would be that of the fairy child who danced
upon the mountains like a flame and stole away the children.
Or 'Now who will be so loyal as to follow him?' or 'Can you
be so cruel as to abandon him now ? ' ; or with a different feeling:
'Now that Fergus knows everything, who will come and join
in his meditations; who will share his melancholy and his know-
ledge; which of you will pierce the mystery of the forest and
rejoice in sympathy with the whole of nature ? ' If before, so
that the force of now is : ' There is still time to drive f wkh Fergus,
as he is still a king in the world,' or 'There is still time to give a
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 189
 
warning, as the fatal thing has not yet happened'; then the first
line gives: 'Who will come out with the great figures of the
Court, and join in their sensible out-of-door pictures ?'
 
If before, the second verse means: 'You need not brood,
because Fergus is guardian of commonsense ; he is a strong man
to drive war-chariots, as you should be ; he owns all the territory
on which magic takes place ; he will keep it under decent con-
trol; there is no need for you to worry about it.' If after: 'Do
not brood; be warned by Fergus, who though still king, still
technically in command of war-chariots, is true ruler only of the
dim appurtenances of magic dreams,' or, since there is no mis-
taking the triumph of the line about cars into whatever melan-
chfily the verse trails away, ' Remember that though Fergus is a
great poet or philosopher or what not, though he drives some
mythological chariot of the Muses,' of whose details I am afraid
I am ignorant, 'yet even he, because these victories involved
brooding, is reduced to the dim and ghostly condition of the last
three lines.'
 
I said that an example of the sixth type must say nothing, and
this poem says: 'Do not brood.' But the words have little of
the quality of an order ; they convey rather : ' How strange and
sad that you should still be brooding ! ' ; and one may interpret
variously the transition from advice to personal statement, from
such of an imperative as was intended to the mere pain of loss,
in the repetition of no more. ' I, in that I am Fergus, can no more
turn aside from brooding,' is a sort of false grammar by juxta-
position, which may be felt in the line, and there is a suggestion
that they must now lose their dreams, as they have already lost
the real world, without getting anything in exchange for either.
'All has grown bitter, and who can join in either activity of
Fergus any longer?' One might finally distinguish the erotic
brooding of the young persons from the philosophical brooding
of Fergus, which as hoping for nothing is at once grander and
more empty; no doubt this distinction is only intended faintly,
since it is part of the wisdom of the language of the poet that it
treats these two as of the same kind. But, in so far as it is
intended, it allows of an opposite meaning for 'Do not brood'
' Do ndt ^rood in this comparatively trivial fashion but go and
drive with Fergus, who will teach you to brood about everything,
 
 
 
J90 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
who will teach you to wander, untouchable, and all-embracing,
 
in an isolation like that of the stars.'
 
The waveriftg and suggestive indefiniteness of nineteenth-
century poetry is often merely weak. When, as here, it has a
great deal of energy and sticks in your head, it is usually because
the opposites left open are tied round a single strong idea; thus
here, on the one hand, the condition of brooding is at once to be
sought out and to be avoided; on the other, the poet, * nothing,
being all,' contemporaneously living all lives, may fitly be Holding
before him both the lives of Fergus, and drawing the same moral
from either of them.
 
In a sense the sixth class is included within the fourth. In the
fourth class several feelings, several reactions to a complex situa-
tion, are united by the writer, and can be accepted as a unity
by the reader. The criterion for the sixth class is more verbal ;
the same result may be achieved, but it must be by an evasive
mode of statement. Thus the last example of my fourth chapter
belongs by rights either to the fifth or to the sixth; I gave a
rather nagging and irrelevant analysis of one of the great passages
of Wordsworth, and complained that his theological statements
were either so muddled or so evasive as not to disturb people of
many shades of theological opinion. In a sense this is only to
say that it is a sort of generalisation from theological opinions;
Wordsworth is concerned with the resultant sentiments rather
than the source of belief from which they are drawn. So one
cannot say that he is contradicting himself, even by implication,
because the theological ideas he has to invoke are not, so to speak,
what he wants to make a statement about. I put it at the end of
the fourth chapter, partly because in this sense the example is
not a contradiction, and partly as a transition, to show how the
same methods could be used for a different case.
 
But the criterion for the sixth class is not merely verbal, in
contrast with the psychological criterion of the fourth ; indeed,
if a poet is using language properly, it ought to be impossible to
maintain such a distinction. So here, as cause or result of their
verbal form, 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. Of course,
the same verbal form may be used for an opposite reason, because
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 191
 
he takes the solution of his contradiction for granted, and feels
sure that he will be understood; I should not call this a genuine
ambiguity in the sense with which I am concerned, and must
claim not to have selected such examples for this chapter.
 
But these two sorts of resolvable contradiction are alike in this :
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. They are both then similar to the nineteenth-
century form of modishness, which worked by implying it was
obviously too exhausted (by its wealth of experience, or by the
inadequacy of everything in sight at the moment) to say or feel
anything very positively, and that you were a fool if you didn't
already understand what it was taking for granted. (The corre-
sponding thing at present is to express quite strong feelings, in a
placid way, but feelings such as would only have occurred to a
very active and widely informed sensibility, so that to the auditor
they seem impressively inappropriate.) In its way such an
evasiveness is a confession of weakness ; and it is chiefly by this
lack of positive satisfaction in the contradiction, by this feeling
that one could say the things more clearly but had much better
not, that I should distinguish advanced examples of the sixth class
from the definite statements of contradictions in the seventh. 1
 
Most of the early examples in the seventh chapter belong to
the sixth, if read as seems to be intended; I am putting them
in the seventh to show the scale as a whole.
 
The sixth type is related to the seventh much as the third is
related to the fourth; in each case the earlier on my scale is more
conscious because more superficial. W. B. Yeats' poem contains
both types ; the doubt as to the meaning of now was, I take it,
a * device/ employed for compactness and to display the poet's
assumptions, and suchlike; the doubt as to the merits of brood-
ing, which I suggested later, is a 'mood,' or enshrines the poet's
permanent attitude to the word. It might be argued that the
first doubt is of the sixth type, but the second of the seventh.
To a consideration of the seventh I shall now proceed.
 
1 The Herbert example in this chapter, which fits the logical criterion
neatly, does not seem to fit the psychological one, as it is certainly not weak.
But you could call it evasive ; because Herbert in writing about himself
keeps a certain^ reserve.
 
 
 
VII
 
As[ example of the seventh type of ambiguity, or at any rate
of the last type of this series, as it is the most ambiguous that
can be conceived, 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 funda-
mental division in the writer's mincy You might think thkt such
a case could never occur and, if it occurred, could not be poetry,
but as a matter of fact it is, in one sense or another, very frequent,
and admits of many degrees. One might say, clinging to the
logical aspect of this series, that the idea of * opposite' is a com-
paratively late human invention, admits of great variety of
interpretation (having been introduced wherever there was an
intellectual difficulty), and corresponds to nothing in the real
world; that a . b is contrary to a for all values of 6; that words
in poetry, like words in primitive languages (and like, say, the
Latin altus, high or deep, the English let, allow or hinder), often
state a pair of opposites without any overt ambiguity; that in
such a pair you are only stating, for instance, a scale, which
might be extended between any two points, though no two points
are in themselves opposites; and that in searching for greater
accuracy one might say * 2 per cent, white ' and mean a very black
shade of grey. Or one might admit that the criterion in this last
type becomes psychological rather than logical, in that the crucial
point of the definition has become the idea of a context, and the
total attitude to that context of the individual.
 
A contradiction of this kind may be meaningless, but can never
be a blank; it has at least stated the subject which is under dis-
cussion, and has given a sort of intensity to it such as one finds
in a gridiron pattern in architecture because it gives prominence
neither to the horizontals nor to the verticals, and in a check
pattern because neither colour is the ground on which the other
is placed; it is at once an indecision and a structure, like the
symbol of the Cross. Or it may convey an impression of con-
scious ornamentation such as the Sumerians obtained, in the
earliest surviving civilised designs, by putting two* beasts in
exactly symmetrical attitudes of violence, as in supporting a
 
192
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 193
 
coat-of-arms, so that whatever tendencies to action are aroused
in the alarmed spectator, however he imagines the victim or the
huntsman to have been placed, there is just the same claim on his
exclusive attention, with a reassuring impossibility, being made
on the other side, and he is drawn taut between the twto similar
impulses into the stasis of appreciation. You might relate it to
the difference of sound heard by the two ears, which decides
where the sound is coming from, or to the stereoscopic contra-
dictioiis that imply a dimension. 1
 
Opposites, again, are an important element in the Freudian
analysis of dreams ; and it is evident that the Freudian termin-
ology, particularly the word * condensation/ could be employed
with profit for the understanding of poetry. Now a Freudian
opposite at least marks dissatisfaction; the notion of what you
want involves the idea that you have not got it, and this again
involves the 'opposite defined by your context/ which is what
you have and cannot avoid. In more serious cases, causing wider
emotional reverberation, such as are likely to be reflected in
language, in poetry, or in dreams, it marks a centre of conflict;
the notion of what you want involves the notion that you must
not take it, and this again involves the 'opposite defined by your
context/ that you want something different in another part of
your mind. Of course, conflict need not be expressed overtly
as contradiction, but it is likely that those theories of aesthetics
which regard poetry as the resolution of a conflict will find their
illustrations chiefly in the limited field covered by the seventh
type.
 
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; Donne, Herbert,
Jonson, and Crashaw, for instance, were Hebrew scholars, and
the flowering of poetry at the end of the sixteenth century corre-
sponded with the first thorough permeation of the English
language by the translated texts. This is of interest because
 
1 It may be said that the contradiction must somehow form a larger unity
if the final effect is to be satisfying. But the onus of reconciliation can be
laid very heavily on the receiving end. One could, of course, also introduce
much philosophical puzzling about the reconciliation of contradictions. The
German trrtfition in the matter seems eventually based on Indian ideas, best
worked out in' Buddhism. But I daresay there is more than enough theoris-
ing in the text here already.
 
N
 
 
 
194 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Hebrew, having very unreliable tenses, extraordinary idioms, and
a strong taste for puns, possesses all the poetical advantages of a
thorough primitive disorder.
 
I invoke primitive languages on the authority of Freud (Note-
books, vol. iv. No. 10), and cannot myself pretend to understand
their mode of action. The early Egyptians, apparently, wrote
the same sign for * young* and 'old,' showing which was meant
by an additional hieroglyphic, not to be pronounced, which may
have taken the place of gesture in conversation. (This claim is
anyway partly borne out by the standard dictionary of Ancient
Egyptian.) They ' only gradually learnt to separate the two sides
of the antithesis and think of the one without conscious com-
parison with the other/ 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 extra-
ordinary; nobody would do it if his language did not make him;
and if one considers the typical propositions which can be
applied to a baby, other than those as to its age, the opposite
applies less to an old man than to a man in the prime of life. Evi-
dently there are two ways in which such a word could be con-
structed. It may mean, for instance, 'no good for soldiers,
because of age ' ; it may have been thought of in connection with
some idea which regarded the very young and the very old in
the same way. Thus one speaks of the two ends of a stick, though
from another point of view one of them must be the beginning.
Or it may be important to remember that the notion of age
excites conflict in almost all who use it; between recognising
the facts about oneself, and feeling grown-up or feeling still
young and strong.
 
In so far as the opposites are used to resolve or to soften a
conflict, so that an ageing man is not forced suddenly to find
that a new and terrible word will apply to him, or can speak of
himself as a young man by an easy and forgivable alteration of
tone, to this extent there seems nothing peculiarly primitive
about the sentiment, or the delicacy which allows it to be
phrased; it has, perhaps, something primitive in its weakness of
hold on external truth, and its honesty in voicing deaires. And
this form of the identity of opposites is not at all whfat one would
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 195
 
expect from other properties of primitive languages; from the
African grammars which insist on dealing with each case on its
own merits ; from the vocabulary of the language of Terra del
Fuego, which requires a separate noun for each thing that English
would name by permuting nouns and adjectives; from the
thousand different words in Arabic which describe the different
sorts of camel. Indeed, Arabic is a striking case of the mental
sophistication required to use a word which covers its own
opposite, because, though it possesses many such words, they
are of a late origin and were elaborated as a literary grace. The
many examples one can find in English (a 'restive* horse, for
instance, is a horse which is restless because it has been resting
fo/ too long) are almost all later developments in the same way.
So that I believe myself, though this is only a useful prejudice
with which to approach the subject, that though such words
appeal to the fundamental habits of the human mind, and are
fruitful of irrationality, they are to be expected from a rather
sophisticated state of language and of feeling.
 
It seems likely, indeed, that words uniting two opposites are
seldom or never actually formed in a language to express the
conflict between them; such words come to exist for more
sensible reasons, and may then be used to express conflict. Thus
the Egyptian dictionary has much less doubt about the identity
of 'dead white' and 'dead black/ a case for which it would be
hard to invent a plausible conflict, than about the identity of
'young* and 'old.' One reason is that people much more often
need to mention the noticeable than the usual, so that a word
which defines a scale comes to be narrowed down more and more
to its two ends; the English 'temper' is an example of this.
Another reason is that of relational opposites one cannot be
known without the other; to know what a ruled person is you
must know whether the ruler is a general or an archbishop. Thus
a word which names both parts of a relation may be more precise
than a word which only names half of it. Another reason is that,
in complicated matters, you may know that there are two difficult
cases which ought to be distinguished, but being anxious on the
point you find it hard to remember which is which ; to the senses
they maybe opposite, but they excite the same feelings. Thus
primitive painters make lines parallel when they know that they
 
 
 
196 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
are so in fact ; but rather less primitive painters make them meet,
equally often, on the horizon and at the eye of the observer.
There was no conflict in their minds between these two ways of
making lines converge; there was only a general anxiety as to
the convergence of lines. In so far, in short, as you know that
two things are opposites, you know a relation which connects
them.
 
This discussion is in some degree otiose because I really do
not know what use the Egyptians made of their extraoVdinary
words, or how * primitive* we should think their use of them if
we heard them talking; whereas I have, at any rate, a rough idea
of how the words are being used in the examples which follow.
I have been searching the sources of the Nile less to explain
English verse than to cast upon the reader something of the awe
and horror which were felt by Dante arriving finally at the most
centrique part of earth, of Satan, and of hell.
 
Quando noi fummo l, dove la coscia
 
Si volge appunto in sul grosso delP anche,
La Duca con fatica e con angoscia
 
Volse la testa ov* egli avea le zanche.
 
We too must now stand upon our heads, and are approaching
the secret places of the Muse.
 
When a contradiction is stated with an air of conviction it may
be meant to be resolved in either of two ways, corresponding to
thought and feeling, corresponding to knowing and not knowing
one's way about the matter in hand. Grammatical machinery
may be assumed which would make the contradiction into two
statements; thus '/> and p 9 may mean: 'If a~a v then/); if
a=# 2 , then p. 9 If a and a 2 are very different from one another,
so that the two statements are fitted together with ingenuity,
then I should put the statement into an earlier type ; if a and 2 are
very like one another, so that the contradiction expresses both the
need for and the difficulty of separating them, then I should
regard the statement as an ambiguity of the seventh type corre-
sponding to thought and knowing one's way about the matter
in hand. But such contradictions are often used, as it were by
analogy from this, when the speaker does not know what a^
and 2 are; he satisfies two opposite impulses and. afe a sort of
apology, admits that they contradict, but claims that they are
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 197
 
like the soluble contradictions, and can safely be indulged; by
admitting the weakness of his thought he seems to have sterilised
it, to know better already than any one who miglft have pointed
the contradiction out ; he claims the sympathy of his audience
in that * we can none of us say more than this/ and gains dignity
in that even from the poor material of human ignorance he can
distil grace of style. One might think that contradictions of this
second sort (corresponding to feeling, and not knowing one's
way about the matter in hand) must always be foolish, and even
if they say anything to one who understands them can quite as
justifiably say the opposite to one who does not. But, indeed,
human life is so much a matter of juggling with contradictory
impulses (Christian-worldly, sociable-independent, and such-
like) that one is accustomed to thinking people are probably
sensible if they follow first one, then the other, of two such
courses; any inconsistency that it seems possible to act upon
shows that they are in possession of the right number of prin-
ciples, and have a fair title to humanity. Thus any contradiction
is likely to have some sensible interpretations ; and if you think
of interpretations which are not sensible, it puts the blame on you.
 
If 'p and />' could only be resolved in one way into: 'If
a=a v then pi if a=a^ then />,' it would at least put two state-
ments into one. In many cases the subsidiary uses of language
limit very sharply the possible interpretations, and the ambiguity
is only of this sensible sort. But it is evident that any degree of
complexity of meaning can be extracted by 'interpreting* a con-
tradiction; any ^ and x # 2 may be selected, that can be attached
to some x fl arising out of p\ and any such pair may then be read
the other way round, as 'If x a= x # 2 , then/); if X a= x a 1 , then
p. 9 The original contradiction has thus been resolved into an
indefinite number of contradictions: 'If fl= x fl y , then p and p,'
to each of which the same process may again be applied. 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.
 
Thus the seventh type of ambiguity involves both the anthro-
pological idea of opposite and the psychological idea of context,
so that it frijjst be approached warily. I shall begin by listing
some very moderate and sensible examples, some of merely
 
 
 
198 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
linguistic interest, and showing how they may be considered as
examples of this type. I hope that the later examples will leave
no doubt that ft is different from both the earlier types which
approximate to it.
 
At any rate, the conditions for this verbal effect are not those
of a breakdown of rationality; I should take as an example, for
instance (of the conditions, though not of the effect), these very
straightforward and martial words of Dryden :
 
The trumpet's loud clangour
 
Invites us to arms
With shrill notes of anger
 
And mortal alarms.
The double double double beat
 
Of the thundering drum
 
Cries, heark the Foes come ;
Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat.
 
(Song for St. Cecilia's Day.)
 
It is curious on the face of it that one should represent, in a
mood of such heroic simplicity, a reckless excitement, a feverish
and exalted eagerness for battle, by saying (in the most prom-
inent part of the stanza from the point of view of final effect)
that we can't get out of the battle now and must go through with
it as best we can. Yet that is what has happened, and it is not a
cynical by-blow on the part of Dryden ; the last line is entirely
rousing and single-hearted. Evidently the thought that it is no
good running away is an important ingredient of military en-
thusiasm ; at any rate in the form of consciousness of unity with
comrades, who ought to be encouraged not to retreat (even if
they are not going to, they cannot have not thought of it, so that
this encouragement is a sort of recognition of their merits), and
of consciousness of the terror one should be exciting in the foe ;
so that all elements of the affair, including terror, must be part
of the judgment of the most normally heroic mind, and that,
since it is too late for him to retreat, the Lord has delivered him
into your hands. Horses, in a way very like this, display mettle
by a continual expression of timidity.
 
This extremely refreshing way of understanding the elements
of a situation, and putting them down flatly to act jss*a measure
of excitement, is a characteristic of Dryden ; and a much more
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 199
 
universal characteristic of good poetry, by the way, than most
we have considered so far. It is not, for instance, due to the
habits of the English language ; and Dryden's u9e of it is con-
nected with the Restoration wish to tidy the language up, make
it more rational, and produce something transferable which
would be respected on the Continent. Dryden is not interested
in the echoes and recesses of words; he uses them flatly; he is
interested in the echoes and recesses of human judgment. (One
must remember in saying this the critics who have said he was
interested in rhetoric but not in character; the two things are
compatible.) He is doing the same thing in the grand patriotic
close of King Arthur, when on a public occasion, after magicians
and" spirits from machines have explained the glories of England
that shall come after, the king replies, as from the throne :
 
Wisely you have, whate'er will please, reveal'd,
What wou'd displease, as wisely have concealed.
 
The remark is sharp but not damping; is quite different from
the generous depression of Johnson which is a development from
it; shows a power of understanding a situation while still feeling
excited; and is not the sort of thing any one would have the
courage to say on such an occasion nowadays.
 
Such a mode of expression comes nearer to verbal ambiguity
when it may be analysed in terms of the incidental conveniences
of language, such as sound-effects, and thus put into the first
 
 
 
I taught my silkes, their whistling to forbeare,
Even my opprest shoes, dumb and speechlesse were.
 
(DONNE, Elegy, iv. 51.)
 
Dumb and speechlesse have the same meaning, but their sound
describes the silence and the noise, respectively, to which his
attention is directed.
 
It is worth noting that opprest is a pun, and taught a metaphor ;
because he is in a mood of adventure and generalship which
makes him personify his property, as men have named their
swords, through a heightened interest in their qualities and a
sharper sense of participation in their actions.
 
 
 
oh, too common ill, I brought with me
That, which betrayed me to mine enemy.
 
 
 
200 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Everything he has brought into this alien house is his own in-
vading army; it is a personal betrayal when he is discovered
through his pel fume :
 
Onely, thou bitter sweet, whom I had laid
Next mee, mee traiterously hast betraid.
 
a metaphor drawn from political textbooks, about the spy in
the council-chambers of princes; in the same way opprest means
both 'even when I put my weight upon them* and 'podr good
creatures, what a trial it must have been for them not to cry out
before my path, and proclaim the greatness of their master ! '
 
/ taught my treads evenly and cautiously; silkes and again
whistling give the rustle of the rich cloak, which for two strides
has swung loose, as he tiptoes down the passage. Forbeare, both
from its even and compelling sound, from its quieting and re-
pressive meaning, from the finality of its rhyme with their, and
from the renewed emphasis this rhyme gives to the rhythm of
his strides, shows him catching the thing again, and hushing it.
 
Forbeare, then, is normal onomatopoeia, but speechlesse, or a
word like 'hush,' is not; on the contrary, its sound is a noise
that will carry some distance. You make it partly from an
excitement that finds relief in contrast, partly because it suggests
the sounds you are afraid of and are listening for, partly in order
to make a noise which your confederates will hear even when it
is said softly, partly because, if only from being an unlikely sound
for you to choose, it may easily be mistaken for a natural sound
by your enemies.
 
The second line illustrates both principles. Dumb and the
pause before it, also were as rhyming vtithforbeare, give you the
shoe put down in silence ; opprest, shoes, and speechlesse make it
squeak in a surrounding 'hush.' 'Even now, you see, the fools
have not heard,' or 'This is what I am not letting it do' ; by the
placing of these sibilants we are brought to see at once the silence
and caution of his advance, and, in contrast with it, the triumph
and expectation with which he approaches her bedroom.
 
And again, in part because of the vagueness of the definition,
one may regard even quite casual expressions of relief, or the
throwing off of anxiety, or what not, as of the seventh type.
Thus Macbeth, faced suddenly with the Thaneship of Cawdor
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 201
 
and the foreknowledge of the witches, is drowned for a moment
in the fearful anticipation of crime and in intolerable doubts as
to the nature of foreknowledge. Then, throwii^g the problem
away for a moment (he must speak to the messengers, he need
not decide anything till he has seen his wife)
 
Come what come may,
Time, and the Houre, runs through the roughest Day.
 
Either, 1 if he wants it to happen : 'Opportunity for crime, or the
accomplished fact of crime, the crisis of action or of decision,
will arrive whatever happens; however much, swamped in the
horrors of the imagination, one feels as if one could never make
up 'one's mind. I need not, therefore, worry about this at the
moment ' ; or, if he does not want it to happen : ' This condition
of horror has only lasted a few minutes ; the clock has gone on
ticking all this time ; I have not yet killed him ; there is nothing,
therefore, for me to worry about yet.' These opposites may be
paired with predestination and freewill: 'The hour will come,
whatever I do, when I am fated to kill him, so I may as well keep
quiet ; and yet if I keep quiet and feel detached and philosophical
all these horrors will have passed over me and nothing can have
happened.' And in any case (remembering the martial sugges-
tion of roughest day), 'Whatever I do, even if and when I kill
him, the sensible world will go on, it will not really be as fearful
as I am now thinking it, it is just an ordinary killing like the ones
in the battle.'
 
Time and the Houre together take the singular, and yet you
can parcel out the two opposites between them, as by making
the hour the hour of action and time the rest of time, or detach-
ment, so that they are opposites. These give the two opposed
impulses, towards control, whether control over situation by
committing the murder or over suggestion by not committing
it, and towards yielding, whether yielding to fear so as not to
act or to suggestion so as to act (Macbeth, I. iv. 134 uses the
phrase yield to suggestion). Corresponding to these two there is
a transitive or intransitive meaning of runs through; time and
the hour force the day to its foregone conclusion, as one runs a
man through with a dagger, or time and the hour are, throughout
the day, after all, always quietly running on. The remark does
 
 
 
202 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
not seem as ambiguous as it is because it is a shelving of in-
decision rather than an expression of it. 1
And this, from the same play, is of the same sort.
 
Macbeth
 
Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above
Put on their instruments. Receive what cheer you may,
The Night is long, that never finds the Day.
 
(Act iv. end.)
 
'Villains are punished in the end* is the cheerful part'of the
meaning; but not till the end of the play; we have no reason to
suppose that this night is a short one or will end just yet. Receive
what cheer you may, followed by a comma as in the Folio, should
be imperative: 'Be as cheerful as you can/ or could medh:
4 However cheerful you may be there is a long night before us.'
Death is a long night that will never find day, and we will bring
that darkness on Macbeth if we can ; but on the other hand he
may bring it on us.
 
The total effect is cheerful enough, but not because these
opposites are ill-balanced; the overtone is a stoical sense that
one cannot alter the length of a night, and that human affairs
are too brief and uncertain for it to be worth while becoming
agitated about them.
 
No less complete opposites are a normal property of the
language of faint and distant innuendo :
 
In her youth
 
There is a prone and speechlesse dialect
Such as move men.
 
(Measure for Measure, I. ii. 185.)
 
This is the stainless Isabel, being spoken of by her respectful
brother. Prone means either 'inactive and lying flat* (in retire-
ment or with a lover) or 'active,' 'tending to,' whether as moving
men, by her subtlety or by her purity, or as moving in herself, for
pleasure or to do good. Speechlesse will not give away whether
she is shy or sly, and dialect has abandoned the effort to distin-
guish between them. The last half-line makes its point calmly,
with an air of knowing about such cases; and, indeed, I feel very
indelicate in explaining Claudio's meaning. It is difficult to put
 
;
 
1 I realise that this analysis seems too elaborate, and yet I c&inot see what
else (what less) the line means if it is taken seriously as meaning anything.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 203
 
the workings of the mind into a daylight which alters their pro-
portions without an air either of accusation or of ribaldry; he is
making no moral judgment of his sister's character, and only
thinking that as a weapon against Angelo she is well worth
being given a try.
 
And, for an extreme but illuminating example of the triviality
with which this class is compatible, consider
 
Blood hath bene shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere humane Statute purg'd the gentle Weale ;
 
(Macbeth, m. iv. 75.)
 
where gentle might just as well be, and suggests, * ungentle,'
because the weal is conceived as 'ungentle' before it was purged
and gentle afterwards.
 
In general, an adjective by showing where it is to be applied,
and assuming it makes a genuine distinction, can always imply
its opposite elsewhere. But there is usually a crux as to where
it is to be implied, and by whom; all that can strictly be deduced
from the use of an adjective with a noun is that the author believes
that, at some place and some time, some one might not have
used the same adjective with the same noun. So that this form
of implication, though normal to the idea of an adjective, takes
effect only when the context brings it out.
 
Even when there is a more serious difference between the
two meanings, it often does not matter which of two 'opposites'
is taken, because the sentence already contains a paradox which
includes both of them. For these and similar reasons, poetry
has a surprising amount of equilibrium; bowdlerisation, for
instance, is often comically helpless to alter the spirit of a
passage.
 
I remember some critic saying that the whole attitude to life
which crystallised out round Pope, all that jaunty defiance against
mystery and disorder, all that sense of personal rectitude, in that
it is virtue enough to have been sensible, all that faith in the
ultimate rationality, even the ultimate crudity, of the world,
were summed up in the lines which introduce the Essay on Man.
Let us
 
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze ! But not without a plan.
 
 
 
204 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
To those who think this a just piece of criticism it must always
seem curious that Pope originally wrote
 
A mighty maze, and all without a plan,
 
and then altered it to its present form because his friends told
him this conflicted with his religious views. (A case, perhaps,
such as was contemplated a few lines later :
 
 
 
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can.
But vindicate the ways of God to man.)
 
My point is that this is not really a joke against the critic, because
the two lines are very nearly the same; a maze is conceited
as something that at once has and has not got a plan, so that,
whichever you say, you are merely expanding the notion already
stated.
 
A maze may be said to have no plan, when it was designed
with a plan to start with, but the plan has since been lost, or at
any rate is not being shown to you. Or it may be said to have
no plan when it is merely an untidy set of walks, and there are
a variety of ways of getting to the centre. Or it might (these are
the meanings that Pope was not allowed) mean that there is no
way of getting to the centre, or even no recognisable centre at
all. But if this were known to be the case it would be useless to
try and expatiate over the thing, and incorrect to call it a maze.
Pope's original antithesis was nearer that between art and nature
than that between a Christian's hope and despair; it was jaunty
and secure because he implied it was worth looking about,
whether the maze had a plan or not; and because, in either case,
it was possible to understand a great deal about the scene of
man y merely by not falling into absurdities. Or one may regard
the contradiction between having and not having a plan, so far
as it went, as already implied, not only in the noun, but in the
noun and adjective respectively: mighty, 'this is a large and diffi-
cult matter, to which we must give all our attention,' but maze,
a quaint affair, stirring to the imagination perhaps but still
mundane, something that would go well in one's private grounds
if one were doing things on a grand scale, as woujd*a Greek
temple or the parish church for that matter, and though entailing
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 205
 
tedium and inconvenience still a suitable occupation for a
gentleman.
 
From this point of view, to admit it might rot have a plan
while taking for granted it was capable of having a plan made
for it, this confession of doubt is the final expression of security ;
shows the fading from consciousness of any further need for the
encouragement of external faith; views from outside and has
learnt not to imagine the isolation of the heart of man.
 
Misreadings of poetry, as every reader must have found, often
give examples of this plausibility of the opposite term. I had
at one time a great admiration for that line of Rupert Brooke's
about
 
The keen
Impassioned beauty of a great machine,
 
a daring but successful image, it seemed to me, for that contrast
between the appearance of effort and the appearance of certainty,
between forces greater than human and control divine in its
foreknowledge, which is what excites one about engines; they
have the calm of beauty without its complacence, the strength of
passion without its disorder. So it was a shock to me when I
looked at one of the quotations of the line one is always seeing
about, and found that the beauty was unpassioned, because
machines, as all good nature-poets know, have no hearts. I still
think that a prosaic and intellectually shoddy adjective, but it is
no doubt more intelligible than my emendation, and sketches
the same group of feelings.
 
Evidently the simplest way for the two opposites defined by
the context to be suggested to the reader is by some disorder in
the action of the negative ; as by its being easily passed over or
too much insisted upon. Thus in the Keats Ode to Melancholy
 
No, no; go not to Lethe; neither twist
 
tells you that somebody, or some force in the poet's mind, must
have wanted to go to Lethe very much, if it took four negatives
in the first line to stop them. The desire to swoon back into
pure sensation, abandonment of the difficulties of life, femininity
(from the masculine point of view), or death from consumption
is taken for granted in the reader, and this is powerful as a means
 
 
 
206 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
of putting it there. And on the other hand, we must consider
 
such effects as
 
My God, my God, look not so sharp upon me;
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile;
Ugly Hell gape not: come not, Lucifer;
I'll burn my books. Ah Mephistophelis.
 
(MARLOWE, Faustus.)
 
where there is no stress, as a matter of scansion, on the negatives,
so that the main meaning is a shuddering acceptance, that
informs the audience what is there. But behind this there is also
a demand for the final intellectual curiosity, at whatever cost,
to be satisfied :
 
Let Ugly Hell gape, show me Lucifer;
 
so that perhaps, behind all his terror, it is for this reason that he
is willing to abandon his learning, that he is going to a world
where knowledge is immediate, and in those flames his books
will no longer be required. Faustus is being broken; the depths
of his mind are being churned to the surface; his meanings
are jarring in his mouth ; one cannot recite Ugly Hell gape not
as a direct imperative like 'stop gaping there'; and it is evident
that with the last two words he has abandoned the effort to
organise his preferences, and is falling to the devil like a tired
child. 1
 
Shakespeare's use of the negative is nearly always slight and
casual ; he is much too interested in a word to persuade himself
that it is 'not' there, and that one must think of the opposite
of its main meaning.
 
There's not a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half-
shirt is two napkins tacked together and thrown over the shoulders
like a herald's coat without sleeves ; and the shirt, to say the truth,
stolen from my host at St. Alban's, or the red-nosed innkeeper of
Daventry.
 
1 A critic said that my interpretation here is wrong because the actor is
meant to scream with horror not sound like a tired child. Certainly * tired
child ' is a bit off the point. But the more the actor screams the stressed
words the less the audience hears the unstressed words * not ' * not/
 
In many languages new forms for expressing the negative have been intro-
duced, because the old form being unstressed becomes progressively harder
to hear. Hence the French pas etc. and the English do with the negative.
This is clear evidence that the unstressed negative gets lost ir conveniently
often. For that matter press correspondents regularly cable ^he quaint and
expensive grammatical form NOT REPEAT NOT.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 207
 
There lives not three good men unhanged in all England, and
one of them is fat and grows old.
 
There's not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they
are for the town-end, to beg during life.
 
One must bear Falstaff in mind when considering how Shake-
speare came to write
 
MAR. Tullus Aufidius, is he within your walls ?
ist SEN. No, nor a man that fears you lesse than he ;
'that's lesser than a little. (Cor., i. iv. 13.)
 
The boast was to have been that nobody feared Marcius in the
whole town, any more than the hero Aufidius feared him; the
second line, at any rate, can have no other point; but on second
thoughts that might have implied Aufidius feared him a great
deal, since the town could not plausibly claim to be braver than
its admitted leader. So more was changed to lesse; the first line
became a statement of Aufidius' courage; if you are puzzled for
a moment by the negatives, fear you lesse evidently means that
somebody is very brave ; the second line insists that somebody
else is even braver ; and if the sentence is said quickly it certainly
sounds like a sharp reply. At any rate it is doing its best with
the difficulty of not implying the wrong thing, in that no obvious
emendation is more sensible. Such muddles with negatives are
common enough in Elizabethan writings ; like Spenser's
 
Thus did she watch, and weare the weary night
In waylful plaints, that none was to appease ;
Now walking soft, now sitting still upright,
As sundry chaunge her seemed best to ease.
Ne lesse did Talus suffer sleep to seaze
His eyelids sad, but watcht continually,
Lying without her door in great disease ;
Like to a spaniel wayting carefully
Lest any should betray his lady treacherously.
 
(Faerie Queene, v. vi. 26.)
 
No more than Britomart did Talus allow sleep to seaze his eyelids
sad; on the other hand, no less than Britomart did he suffer in
great disease. And, ignoring this verbal attraction, the parts of
the lines are thought of as quite separate pieces of ornamentation,
laid on flatly; suffer sleep to seaze is translated into 'go to sleep
try to kdfep awake* without thinking about Ne lesse (='So
 
 
 
208 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
too '). I have quoted the whole verse to show how impossible
it would be to have any other reading, once you have got into the
movement. It is important to bear in mind this attitude to
grammar; once these floating and ill-attached parts of speech
are crushed together into a pun (cease, as it were, to obey the
pure gas laws) it is a matter, not of calculation, but of experiment,
to see what corrections to the formula must be applied.
 
Perhaps the strangest case of Spenser's indifference to irrelev-
ant meaning, lack of stress upon syntax, and readiness to push
words quite flatly, without apology, into their place in the pattern,
occurs during one of the descriptions of a dragon.
 
And at the point two stings infixed arre
 
Both deadly sharpe, that sharpest steele exceedeth farre.
 
But stings and sharpest steele did far exceed
The sharpnesse of his cruell rending clawes.
 
(i. xi. 11-12.)
 
Both these statements mean the opposite of what they say; steel
stings claws are in ascending, not as a grammarian would
suppose in descending, order of sharpness. It must seem an
extraordinary degree of perversity which made exceedeth a
singular verb, agreeing with the two stings, thought of as a single
weapon according to the usual Elizabethan practice, or with the
abstract idea, not stated till the next verse, of their sharpness, so
that its only obvious subject is steel. But I doubt if Spenser
gave it any attention; the main point of the lines is to compare
stings with steel, as of a similar degree of sharpness, and to say
they are both exceedingly sharp.
 
I should connect a certain blankness in the meaning of this
example with a much more rational failure on the part of Merth
to say what she intended.
 
What bootes it all to have, and nothing use ?
Who shall him re we, that swimming in the maine,
Will die for thirst, and water doth refuse ?
Refuse such fruitlesse toile, and present pleasures chuse.
 
(n. vi. 17.)
 
Since the maine in Spenser is always the sea, the lady has chosen
an absurdly bad example, at first sight only for the *ake of the
rhyme. But it is not the duty of a poet to put good arguments
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 209
 
into the mouths of persons with whom he disagrees, and it is
rather a profound evolutionary by-blow, which fits in very well
with Spenser's sensuous idealism, that such a maadoes not drink
the sea- water because it will hurt him and because it tastes nasty.
Shakespeare sometimes throws in a 'not' apparently to suggest
extra subtlety:
 
LENOX. And the right valiant Banquo walked too late,
Whom you may say (if *t please you) Fleans kill'd,
For Fleans fled: Men must not walke too late.
Who cannot want the thought, how monstruous
It was for Malcolme, and Donalbaine
To kill their gracious Father ? (Macbeth, in. vi.)
 
Who can avoid thinking, is the meaning; but the not breaks
through the irony into 'Who must not feel that they have not
done anything monstrous at all ? ' ' Who must not avoid thinking
altogether about so touchy a state matter ? ' This is not heard as
the meaning, however, the normal construction is too strong, and
the negative acts as a sly touch of disorder.
 
There is an altered sign in Troilus serving a similar purpose :
 
PAND. If ever you prove false one to another ... let all constant
men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers-between
Pandars. (in. ii. 216.)
 
The correction to inconstant' is wrong because this was evid-
ently said well on the front of the apron-stage, an address straight
to the audience, which appealed to what everybody knew was
going to be the story ; he is pointing to each in turn, ' you know
what we puppets stand for, it is a strong simple situation,' at the
end of the scene.
 
It is not so much that 'not' was said lightly and might easily
be ignored as that it implied a conflict (or why should you be
saying one of the innumerable things the subject was not, instead
of the one thing it was ?), and it was upon this conflict, rather
than upon the value of the passage as information, that the
reader's sympathy devolved.
 
Stone walls do not a prison make,
 
Nor iron bars a cage ;
Minds innocent and quiet take
 
That for a hermitage. (To Althea.)
 
 
 
zio SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
The point of the poem is to describe those services that are
freedom; constancy to a mistress, loyalty to a political party,
obedience to God, and the limited cosiness of good company;
thus to focus its mood, to discover what shade of interpretation
Lovelace is putting on the blank cheque of a paradox, is in a
sense to define the meaning of not in the first two lines. This is
done to some extent by the grammar of the verse itself.
 
That may be 'the fact that they do not make a prison/ and
we are then told that this notion withdraws the mind, a^ if to a
hermitage, from the anxieties of the world. But on the face of
it, that is the cage or prison itself, and by being singular, so that
it will not apply to walls or bars, it admits that they do, in fact,
make even for quiet minds a prison and a cage. It is curioub to
read 'those ' instead of that, and see how the air of wit evaporates
and generous carelessness becomes a preacher's settled desire to
convince. If you read 'them' there is a further shift because
the metre becomes prose; the sentiment might be by Bunyan,
and one wonders if it is at all true.
 
However, this experiment has hardly a fair chance, as there is
another ambiguity which gives the verse recklessness, with an
air both of paradox and of reserve. Take is a verb active in feel-
ing though presumably here passive in sense; thus though it
mainly says, 'such minds accept prison for their principles and
can turn it into a hermitage,' there is some implication that 'such
minds imprison themselves, escape from life, perhaps escape
from their mistress, into jail, and cannot manage without their
martyrdom.' It is the proximity of quiet which hushes this
meaning, and keeps it from spoiling the proportions of the poem
as a whole ; 'such persons, madam, were aware of the advantages
of retiring from the world, and are accepting their misfortune
with some philosophy.' There is another shade of meaning
which is almost 'mistake,' as in 'cry you mercy, I took you for a
joint-stool '; 'such minds may be so innocent that they know
no difference between a prison and a hermitage'; for this they
may be mocked or revered, but it is with irony that the poet
includes himself among them; or 'so quiet that they pretend
not to know the difference,' with a saintly impertinence that
would have pleased George Herbert.
 
All these meanings are no more than slight overtones or grace-
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 211
 
notes; the main meaning is sufficiently brave and is conveyed
with enough fervour to stand alone ; thus, looking back to that,
it may after all refer to walls and bars, and be attracted into the
singular by the neighbouring hermitage.
 
I shall close the mild section of the seventh type with the most
rational possible form of depraved negative, which puts some-
thing into your head while telling you it is not part of the picture.
Thus Swinburne's
 
When the blood of thy foemen made fervent
A sand never moist from the main . . .
On sands by the storm never shaken
Nor wet from the washing of tides . . .
 
(Dolores.)
 
is not so much defining the sand of the arena as dragging in the
sand of the sea, which has not so far been mentioned; by this
simple device with negatives (Greek choruses are fond of it) he
brings in the idea of Venus as born from the sea and, for himself
if not for the reader, his whole pack of associations about the
Great Sweet Mother.
 
Or for an even flatter use :
 
. . . behind her Death,
 
Close following pace for pace, not mounted yet
On his pale horse . . . (Paradise Lost, x. 590.)
 
where, as saints in windows carry a gridiron, not for use, but
because it is expected of them, or as the newspapers tell you there
is no news to-day about the latest murder, so the pale horse is
mentioned because people like to be reminded it is sometimes
there.
 
There is another Shakespearean negative in one of the songs
of Ophelia, an irrelevant little word in itself, which supports a
faint but an elaborate reverberation of feeling; becomes, to an
attent ear, a full ambiguity; and drapes about itself for a moment
the whole structure of the play.
 
OPH. White his Shrow'd as the Mountaine Snow.
QUE. Alas looke heere my Lord.
OPH . Larded with sweet flowers :
 
'* JVhich bewept to the grave did not go,
 
With true-love showres. (Hamlet, IV. v.)
 
 
 
212 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Evidently Pope was right in leaving out not from the point of
view of the song considered as detached from the play. 1 Which
may refer to tke shroud, the snow, or the flowers', anyway true-
love showres contains a metaphor connecting them. The situa-
tions of flowers and the corpse may be either parallel or opposed
with regard to mourners ; and it may be either flowers, if they
are dewy, or human mourners, who weep, or do not weep, for
the corpse.
 
It is easy to forget Ophelia's situation, and feel that sKe was a
sweet pathetic creature, and it was somehow natural that she
should be crazy. She has been told that because she obeyed her
father her lover has gone mad ; her lover has certainly abandoned
her with insults, and has certainly, with indifference, killed her
father.
 
The Shrow'd, then, is white because it covers one who is so
noble and so valuable to her and because it is soon to be stained
with corruption; it is glimmering before her mind's eye. Not
may negate going or weeping. That the ear expects did go may
mean that all nature wept for Polonius ; that it gets did not go
may mean he was interred in hugger-mugger (probably without
any shroud); that it expects did go may mean Polonius is dead
and buried; that it gets did not go may mean that, whether
Hamlet wept for him or not, he went first into the lobby where
he was safely stowed', that it expects did go may mean that
Hamlet is dead to her, that she feels he must really be dead and
she ought to weep for him, and that he is going to England at
the risk of his life ; that it gets did not go may mean that he is not
really dead, that she must not weep for one who is alive and
has so wronged her (the end of their love was not his death but
his murder of her father), and that he is going to come back
from England safely. She may alter the song through an echo
of the misanthropy of her lover, from a feeling that flowers ought
not to be mixed up with corpses, that the plucked flowers are
the objects on a bier that ought really to be mourned for, though
they are not. Or the dead man of the song may be Hamlet's
 
1 I seem to have missed the point of the song taken alone. The apparent
shroud of the snow is really a protection for the coming flowers of the spring,
and therefore need not be wept. But this theological hope for t> e dead man
of the song acts as a source of pathos while you consider the people Ophelia
had in mind.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 213
 
father, so that the whole scene is a sort of satire against the
Queen. I must consider the whole scene to insist upon this point.
Ophelia, when mad, is used as much to refer* to other char-
acters' histories as her own, being an inspired figure, or merely
the reverberation of the play. The irony against the Queen is
not intended, then, as in Ophelia's own mind; it is partly an
isolated dramatic irony and partly a device to put us inside the
guilty mind of the Queen, 'full of artless jealosy,' to whom 'each
toy seems prologue to some great amiss.' She begins the scene
by refusing to speak with her, but Ophelia enters with reverence,
as an ambassador with news, or in ironical accusation.
 
(Enter OPHELIA distracted.)
* OPH. Where is the beauteous Majesty of Denmark?
 
There may be a meaning such as Hamlet has elaborated ; ' where
is the vanished dignity of a world which has gone rotten?'; but
she makes her exit with the same dignity. 1
 
OPH. How should I your true love know from another one?
By his Cockle hat and staffe, and his Sandal shoone.
 
'How should I know which of your husbands is your true love,
you whose reality escapes me. Which is the true pilgrim for his
mistress's favour, the Ghost doomed for a certain time to walk
the earth, the bloat King who has lost his peace of mind to win
you, or your loving son you have just sent from me to his death
in England ? '
 
QUE. Alas sweet Lady; what imports this Song?
 
OPH. Say you? Nay, pray you marke.
He is dead and gone Lady, he is dead and gone,
At his head a grass-greene Turfe, at his heeles a stone.
 
'Pray you marke; the one you have killed already was the true
one, and even the turf and stone will not keep him down. And
it is my dead father, not Hamlet, who truly loved me.'
 
(Enter King.)
It is he who is walking now, not the Ghost, as the Queen's true
 
love.
 
QUE. Nay but Ophelia.
OPH. Pray you marke;
 
1 The pJtnt is that by dropping this initial brick she establishes herself
with the audience as a figure who is expected to drop more important bricks
later.
 
 
 
214 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
and she sings the song I have quoted. From this point of view it
is the Ghost whose Shrovfd is so white, and the Queen's look here
recalls : 'look here, upon this picture and on this/ In so far as old
Hamlet went to the grave he did not go unwept, but he went wept
falsely by his Queen, also, perhaps, unwept by flowers, without
approval of nature, in that he died unshriven; in so far as he did
not go to the grave he walked the earth, and so caused weeping.
 
But I am not sure that this is a complete example of the
seventh type. There are too many implications, all* rather
distant, for a genuine pair of opposites to collide; one must
distinguish between mere wealth of relevance to the setting (first
type), mere disorder of preferences united in a single act of the
sensibility (fourth to sixth types) and an impulse to state efo-
phatically 'the two opposites defined by the context'; for this
poor Ophelia, in the exhaustion of her wreckage, can hardly put
in a claim. I have put the example here as a particularly
elaborate use of the negative ; it might have gone well enough
among the dramatic ironies in the first chapter.
 
Keats often used ambiguities of this type to convey a dissolu-
tion of normal experience into intensity of sensation. This need
not be concentrated into an ambiguity.
 
Let the rich wine within the goblet boil
Cold as a bubbling well
 
is an example of what I mean ; and the contrast between cold
weather and the heat of passion which is never forgotten through-
out St. Agnes' Eve. It is the * going hot and cold at once' of
fever. The same method is worth observing in detail when in
the Ode to Melancholy it pounds together the sensations of joy
and sorrow till they combine into sexuality.
 
No, no: go not to Lethe, neither twist
 
Wolf s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine :
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed
 
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine ;
Make not your rosary of yewberries,
 
Nor let the beetle nor the death-moth be
 
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries ;
 
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And dull the wakeful anguish of the soul. 1 ^ *'
 
1 The whole poem is quoted gradually.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 215
 
One must enjoy the didactic tone of this great anthology piece ;
it is a parody, by contradiction, of the wise advice of uncles.
* Of course, pain is what we all desire, and I am sure I hope you
will be very unhappy. But if you go snatching at it before your
time, my boy, you must expect the consequences; you will
hardly get hurt at all.'
 
'Do not abandon yourself to melancholy, delightful as that
would be, or you will lose the sensations of incipient melancholia.
Do not think always about forgetting, or you will forget its pain.
Do not achieve death, or you can no longer live in its shadow.
Taste rather at their most sharp the full sensations of death, of
melancholy, and of oblivion.' But I have paraphrased only for
my own pleasure ; there is no need for me to insist on the con-
trariety of the pathological splendours of this introduction.
 
Opposite notions combined in this poem include death and
the sexual act, a pair of which I must produce further examples;
pain and pleasure, perhaps as a milder version of this; the con-
ception of the woman as at once mistress and mother, at once
soothing and exciting, whom one must master, to whom one
must yield ; a desire at once for the eternity of fame and for the
irresponsibility of oblivion; an apprehension of ideal beauty as
sensual ; and an apprehension of eternal beauty as fleeting. The
perfection of form, the immediacy of statement, of the Ode, lie
in the fact that these are all collected into the single antithesis
which unites Melancholy to Joy. Biographers who attempt to
show from Keats's life how he came by these notions are ex-
cellently employed, but it is no use calling them in to explain
why the poem is so universally intelligible and admired ; evid-
ently these pairs of opposites, stated in the right way, make a
direct appeal to the normal habits of the mind.
 
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
 
Sudden from Heaven like a weeping cloud,
 
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud ;
 
Weeping produces the flowers of joy which are themselves sorrow-
ful ; the hill is green as young, fresh and springing, or with age,
mould and geology; April is both rainy and part of springtime ;
and the khroud, an anticipation of death that has its own energy
and beauty, either is itself the fact that the old hill is hidden
 
 
 
216 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
under green, or is itself the grey mist, the greyness of falling rain,
 
which is reviving that verdure.
 
TheA glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the ifcinbow of the salt sand wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies.
 
Either: 'Give rein to sorrow, at the mortality of beauty,' or
' defeat sorrow by sudden excess and turn it to joy, at the intensity
of sensation.' Morning is parallel to April, and pui with
mourning; the flowers stand at once for the more available
forms of beauty, and for the mistress who is unkind.
 
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows
Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
 
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips,
 
Bidding adieu, and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips ;
 
Aye, in the very Temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy hath her sovran shrine.
 
She is at first thy mistress, so that she represents some degree of
joy, however fleeting; then, taking the verse as a unit, she
becomes Veiled Melancholy itself; veiled like a widow or holding
up a handkerchief for sorrow, or veiled, like the hill under its
green, because at first sight joy. Very and sovran, with an air of
making a distinction and overcoming the casual prejudice of the
reader, now insist that this new sort of joy is in part a fusion of
joy and melancholy, sovran means either 'melancholy is here
deepest/ or 'this new production is the satisfactory (and attract-
ive) kind of melancholy'; and she is veiled because only in the
mystery of her ambivalence is true joy to be found.
 
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine ;
 
'Can burst the distinction between the two opposites; can
discover the proud and sated melancholy to which only those are
entitled who have completed an activity and achieved joy.'
 
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 217
 
If sadness here was taken as an attribute of melancholy only,
as the only unambiguous reading must insist, we should have a
tautology which no amount of historical allusion could make
sensible; though melancholy meant Burton and Hamlet and
sadness meant seriousness, it would still be like Coleridge's
parody :
 
So sad and miff; oh I feel very sad.
 
She has* become joy, melancholy, and the beautiful but occasion-
ally raving mistress, the grandeur of the line is unquestioned
only because everybody takes this for granted.
 
Her trophies (death-pale are they all) are cloudy because vague
anfl faint with the intensity and puzzling character of this fusion,
or because already dead, or because, though preserved in verse,
irrevocable. They are hung because sailors on escaping ship-
wreck hung up votive gifts in gratitude (Horace, in. i.), or
because, so far from having escaped, in the swoon of this achieve-
ment he has lost life, independence, and even distinction from
her.
 
No doubt most people would admit that this is how Keats
gets his effects, but the words are not obviously ambiguous be-
cause, in the general wealth of the writing, it is possible to spread
out one to each word the meanings which are actually diffused
into all of them.
 
I began this chapter with references to Freud; this last
example may show how what is accepted as intelligible poetry
may be considered as an association of opposites such as would
interest the psycho-analyst. However, in the Keats Ode it is
more obvious that opposites are being employed than that they
are such as to interest the psycho-analyst; in the following
examples from Crashaw it is more obvious that the psycho-
analyst would be interested than that opposites are being
employed. Crashaw's poetry often has two interpretations,
religious and sexual; two situations on which he draws for
imagery and detail. But are these both the context which is to
define the opposites, or is he using one as a metaphor of the
other, so that the ambiguity is of the first type, or each as a
metaphorA)f each, so that it is of the third ? Is he deceiving us
about either, or just making a poem (detached from life) out of
 
 
 
2i8 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
both ? Is he generalising from two sorts of experience, or finding
a narrow border of experience that both hold in common ? These
questions can only be answered for particular poems, and then
only by a very detailed attention to the attitude taken up by the
poet. Thus I put a poem by Herbert, I gave to Hope a watch of
mine, into the third type, because it applied to the courting both
of God and of a mistress, and laid these two forms of experience
side by side, thinking them different, but not thinking of them
in a different way. (P. 118.) An example from Crashaw on the
same theme was treated as graceful but comparatively trivial.
However, when Crashaw is not being directly witty on this theme
the situation is more complicated. Though he lays them side by
side and talks about both the two forms of experience are 1 as
different as possible; one is good, the other evil. The 'context'
here is that a saint is being adored for her chastity, and the
metaphors about her are veiled references to copulation. Such
a passage, then, must be placed in my seventh class, because the
context defines the two situations as opposites; two opposed
judgments are being held together and allowed to reconcile
themselves, to stake out different territories, to find their own
level, in the mind.
 
The great Hymn to the Name and Honour of the admirable
Sainte Teresa is so innocently interpretable that I need only quote
some passages to make this point clear.
 
She never undertook to know
 
What death with love should have to doe ;
 
Nor has she e'er yet understood
 
Why to show love, she should shed blood,
 
Yet though she cannot tell you why,
 
She can Love, and she can DY.
 
Scarce has she Blood enough to make
 
A guilty sword blush for her sake ;
 
Yet has she a HEART dares hope to prove
 
How much lesse strong is DEATH than LOVE.
 
. . . she breathes all fire ;
Her weak breast heaves with strong desire
Of what she may with fruitless wishes
Seek for amongst her mother's kisses.
 
I am not saying that this is an ambiguity ; it is the overt metaphor
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 219
 
of Christ as her spouse. But the treatment of the metaphor
amounts to a strange mixture of feeling.
 
. . . some base hand have power to race
Thy Brest's chast cabinet, and uncase
A soul kept there so sweet, O no ;
Wise Heaven will never have it so.
THOU art love's victime ; and must dy
A death more mystical and high. . . .
His is the DART must make the DEATH
Whose stroke shall taste thy hallowed breath. . . .
 
O how oft shalt thou complain
 
Of a sweet and subtle PAIN.
 
Of intolerable JOYES ;
 
Of a DEATH, in which who dyes
 
Loves his death, and dyes again.
 
And would for ever be so slain.
 
And lives, and dyes ; and knowes not why
 
To live, But that he thus may never leave to DY.
 
Oh thou undaunted daughter of desires ; we may echo upon the
poet his praise of the heroine. 1 How hard it is to keep this set
of symbols far enough away from the no less charming set
employed, not thirty years later, by Dryden:
 
The Youth, though in haste,
 
And breathing his last,
 
In pity died slowly, while she died more fast,
 
Till at length she cried, Now, my dear, now let us go,
 
Now die, my Alexis, and I will die too.
 
(Marriage a la Mode.)
 
You might think I was being merely malicious in this colloca-
tion ; trying to defile a Holy Thought by making it into a Dirty
Joke. But the two systems of thought are not as unlike as all
that; Crashaw certainly conceived the bliss of the saints as
extremely like the bliss which on earth he could not obtain
without sin ; and this certainly was a supply of energy to him
and freed his virtue from the Puritan sense of shame. Dryden,
in the same sort of way, is bringing a direct and unassuming
 
1 Crashaw could easily have laughed back at me here. He could have said
that the English are always provincial, and that as a European scholar he was
enriching me language with a normal piece of Counter-Reformation verse.
But this claim f for his own good sense would not, I think, make the convention
he was using any less strange.
 
 
 
220 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
attitude towards sexuality into relation with the heroic manner
of his serious plays, in which people do indeed die for one
another rather easily ; and the views of life contrasted in the song
are no less oddly connected in the whole play it was written for.
Of course, its main point is to be funny ; he is using the metaphor
chiefly as a rag of decency and to laugh at the mystics. But it is
also one of those mutual comparisons which benefit both parties ;
the natural act is given dignity, the heroic act tenderness and a
sort of spontaneity. Or if we can only consider it as a* simple
comparison, still by a sort of public feeling (like that which is the
most real sentiment of his tragedies) he gives the subject a dignity
which is the root of his gaiety; the joke is rather against human
pretensions than human sentiments; there is no suggestion,
after all, that they would not really have died for each other ; and
the strongest resultant feeling, stronger than those of wit, of
grace, and of impertinence, is a pathos not far from the central
sentiment of Christianity. * Pleasure is exhausting and fleeting;
qu'elle est triste, la jeunesse\ nothing is to be valued more
than mutual forbearance; and it is harder to be happy, even
under the most favourable circumstances, than anybody would
have supposed/
 
I have been talking as if Crashaw really thought the bliss of
the saints was like that of the sexes, but, of course, this is too
simple ; we only know that he feels and writes as if it were. One
must consider, to understand such a use of language, not only
what is being described but what terms the speaker has to de-
scribe it in; upon what basis of experience it is being conceived.
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. You may say, then, that this use of metaphor is not
ambiguous at all, but it is certainly similar to ambiguity in a
peculiar way; some people who think this a beautiful poem are
reading it in a very different way from others who would agree
with them. 1 And to find reasons for the fact that any particular
person reads it in any particular way, that he allows any par-
 
1 I hope I may again claim in a footnote that the puzzle as to wiat the term
' ambiguity ' ought to mean was not dropped as the book went forward,
however far I was from solving it.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 221
 
ticular settlement of territory between the two opposite modes of
judgment, one would have to know a great deal about him.
Indeed the way in which a person lives by these vaguely-con-
ceived opposites is the most important thing about his make-up ;
the way in which opposites can be stated so as to satisfy a wide
variety of people, for a great number of degrees of interpretation,
is the most important thing about the communication of the arts.
It is in this sort of way that I must justify my use of these odd
passage as a culmination.
 
One feels, in fact, about much of Crashaw's verse, not that it
is in itself particularly ambiguous, but that the ideas involved are
so unfamiliar, are used in his judgments with such complexity
that to think of it as ambiguous may be the right mode of
approach. This epigram, for instance, is straightforward enough
from its own point of view :
 
Suppose he had been Tabled at thy Teates,
Thy hunger feeles not what he eates :
Hee'l have his Teat e're long (a bloody one)
The Mother then must suck the Son.
 
(Luke xi., Blessed be the paps that thou hast sucked.)
 
This is to show the unearthly relation to earth of the Christ, and
with a sort of horror to excite adoration. The antithesis assumes
he was an ascetic even at the breast, and suppose he had half
refuses to admit that he was once a baby, a parasite and an animal.
Tabled, perhaps, also means 'taught/ whether the natural or the
Judaic law; suppose would then mean that being ever virgin he
never learnt it. The second couplet is 'primitive* enough; a
wide variety of sexual perversions can be included in the notion
of sucking a long bloody teat which is also a deep wound. The
sacrificial idea is aligned with incest, the infantile pleasures, and
cannibalism; we contemplate the god with a sort of savage
chuckle ; he is made to flower, a monstrous hermaphrodite deity,
in the glare of a short-circuiting of the human order. Those
African carvings, and the more lurid forms of Limerick, inhabit
the same world.
 
The grotesque seventeenth-century simile, of which this is a
striking but in no way unique example, belongs to an age of
collection! of interesting oddities rather than to the scientific
(eighteenth-century) age, with its limitations as to what is likely
 
 
 
222 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
to be true and what it is sensible to say ; to an age when all kinds
of private fancies were avowable on their own rights. 1 In con-
sidering what^he time would have called the 'curious' attitude
of Crashaw here, we must remember the Cambridge Platonist
who explained to the learned world that his breast smelt like
violets, and the remarks on the same subject by Montaigne.
One is sometimes driven to find ambiguities, or to become
conscious of them, in mere surprise that such a thing should
have been said ; whereas the fact is that that age was iitcerested
quite simply in such harmless reflections as a child might make
to the embarrassment of the dinner-table. It is fair to give
another example of this from Dryden, in which he now appears
the more innocent and childlike of the two. (It is, of course,- an
early work.) Upon the death of the Lord Hastings, from smallpox :
 
Blisters with pride swelPd, which thr'row's flesh did sprout
 
Like Rose-buds, stuck i* th* Lilly-skin about.
 
Each little Pimple had a tear in it,
 
To wail the fault its rising did commit. . . .
 
Or were those gems sent to adorn his Skin
 
The Cab 'net of a richer Soul within?
 
One is tempted to look around, as I did in the Crashaw quatrain,
for some additional reasons, some strange causes at work, which
would make the sorrowing parents feel satisfaction in this ; but
the machinery of analysis would be irrelevant here ; they just
thought it was 'curious/ and therefore graceful.
 
These steadying reflections must be borne in mind when we
consider how the following quatrain came to be thrust into
Crashaw's translation of the Dies Irae.
 
O let thine own soft bowels pay
Thy self; And so discharge that day.
If sin can sigh, love can forgive.
O say the word my Soul shall live.
 
Something weird and lurid in their apprehension of the
sacrificial system, a true sense of the strangeness of the mind's
world, can continually be felt in the seventeenth-century mystics.
I call it ambiguous, not from any verbal ingenuity of its own,
but because it draws its strength from a primitive system of ideas
 
^
1 In this and the following example I gather that Crashaw wcs not following
 
contemporary models from Catholic European literature.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 223
 
in which the uniting of opposites (of saviour and criminal, for
instance) is of peculiar importance. Of course, you may as well
say it is ambiguous to use any idea which involves fundamental
antinomies ; the idea of relation itself, very likely ; but I am here
concerned only with ambiguities which are of literary interest
and can be felt as complex when they are apprehended.
 
That day (of judgment) may either assume 'on' or be object of
discharge. Discharge has a variety of similar meanings centering
round ' unload/ such as pay, prohibit, exonerate and dismiss;
all these yield slightly different meanings. But evidently the
main meaning, sustained by the pun, is 'and so discharge thy
soft bowels'; it is a brave use of that Biblical metaphor or
physiological truth, according to which the bowels are made
active by sympathy and are the seat of compassion. I find it
difficult to have any clear reaction to this other than ' what fun,
all the Freudian stuff' ; but there seems to be no doubt that it
involves a curious ambivalence of feeling. The patriarchal view
of the matter is not merely an exotic idiom ; it is well known and
felt to be serious ; but among people more civilised and anxiously
delicate than they the metaphor is suppressed (in the New Testa-
ment it is already a relic of language), and the facts on which it is
based are either ignored or recognised only, as in those rather
schoolboy verses by Swift, as a culmination of horror at the night-
mare of the human mechanism. Though Crashaw takes it in his
stride he is deliberately invoking a clash much harsher than the
previous one with Dry den (p. 22 1). Popular language only recog-
nises a yearning of the bowels towards some one ('You are the
sort of person one could afford to signalise love for in such a
way') as a mark of contempt so terrible as to degrade also the
contemner. The same violent and deeply-rooted ambivalence
is the point of that magnificent obscenity in the Dunciad (ii. 83)
where Jupiter by receiving the petitions of humanity with a
travesty of the ancient symbol of compassion makes the in-
difference of God disgusting and the subservience of man
unendurable.
 
Crashaw seems to escape from these conflicts, and it may be
that the oddity of the metaphor was only intended to give a sort
of wit ano^ point to the pun on discharge such as I have put in the
third class, and thought peculiar to the eighteenth century. But
 
 
 
224 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
the two opposite interpretations are active in the verse, though in
so subdued a form ; he is viewing himself as wholly united and
subdued to Gpd, made part of God's body, since this metaphor
is tolerable ; and if we may rely on the idea of infantile modes of
judgment it is as an extreme exercise of humility that he returns
to them. * Forgive me by a compassion as if for yourself; regard
me merely as part of the tribe with which you are united/
 
So far I have regarded this pair of opposites as in some degree
accidental, as a historical matter of the clash of two metaphors.
Freud, however, would regard the pair as a natural unit, as the
mark of a deep-seated conflict in the child between an infantile
pleasure in defecating and the need to learn more adult pleasures.
Assuming such a conflict, its opposites will always suggest One
another : * I must pay God with the most valuable thing possible ;
therefore I must pay God with dung, because that is the most
worthless thing possible. But his own dung is the most valuable
sort conceivable, and matters of this kind have to be kept strictly
private ; it will be much best, then, if I can induce him to pay
himself with that.' To find an image for the purest love, for
the generosity furthest from sexuality, he falls back on sexuality
in its most infantile and least creditable form.
 
No context is more important than that which defines God
and dung as opposites, and it is proper that they should have
been brought into this chapter. But how Crashaw arrived at the
quatrain I have been considering, what his public thought when
they read it, I cannot pretend to know. Probably they just
thought it curious and Biblical and let it go at that.
 
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. But in such cases of
ambiguity of the seventh type one tends to lose sight of the
conflict they assume; the ideas are no longer thought of as
contradictory by the author, or if so, then only from a stylistic
point of view; he has no doubt that they can be reconciled, and
that he is stating their reconciliation. So I shall first consider a
sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover, to Christ
our Lord y as a more evident example of the use oi poetry to
convey an indecision, and its reverberation in the mind.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 225
 
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding
Of the level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there ; how he rung upon the rein of a winrpling wing
In his ecstasy. Then back, back forth on swing
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bowbend; the hurl and
 
gliding
 
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.
 
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh air, pride, plume, here
Buckle ; AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, oh my chevalier.
 
^ No wonder of it. Sheer plod makes plough down sillion
' Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
 
I am indebted to Dr. Richards for this case ; he has already
written excellently about it. I have little to add to his analysis,
and use it here merely because it is so good an example.
 
Hopkins became a Jesuit, and burnt his early poems on enter-
ing the order; there may be some reference to this sacrifice in
the fire of the Sonnet. Confronted suddenly with the active
physical beauty of the bird, he conceives it as the opposite of his
patient spiritual renunciation ; the statements of the poem appear
to insist that his own life is superior, but he cannot decisively
judge between them, and holds both with agony in his mind.
My heart in hiding would seem to imply that the more dangerous
life is that of the Windhover, but the last three lines insist it is
no wonder that the life of renunciation should be the more lovely.
Buckle admits of two tenses and two meanings : 'they do buckle
here/ or 'come, and buckle yourself here '; buckle like a military
belt, for the discipline of heroic action, and buckle like a bicycle
wheel, 'make useless, distorted, and incapable of its natural
motion.' Here may mean 'in the case of the bird,' or 'in the case
of the Jesuit'; then 'when you have become like the bird,' or
'when you have become like the Jesuit.' Chevalier personifies
either physical or spiritual activity; Christ riding to Jerusalem,
or the cavalryman ready for the charge; Pegasus, or the Wind-
hover. J
 
Thus in' the first three lines of the sestet we seem to have a
 
 
 
26 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
clear case of the Freudian use of opposites, where two things
thought of as incompatible, but desired intensely by different
systems of judgments, are spoken of simultaneously by words
applying to both; both desires are thus given a transient and
exhausting satisfaction, and the two systems of judgment are
forced into open conflict before the reader. Such a process, one
might imagine, could pierce to regions that underlie the whole
structure of our thought; could tap the energies of the very
depths of the mind. At the same time one may doubt whether
it is most effective to do it so crudely as in these three lines; this
enormous conjunction, standing as it were for the point of friction
between the two worlds conceived together, affects one rather
like shouting in an actor, and probably to many readers the lines
seem so meaningless as to have no effect at all. The last three
lines, which profess to come to a single judgment on the matter,
convey the conflict more strongly and more beautifully.
 
The metaphor of the fire covered by ash seems most to insist
on the beauty the fire gains when the ash falls in, when its
precarious order is again shattered ; perhaps, too, on the pleasure,
in that some movement, some risk, even to so determinedly static
a prisoner, is still possible. The gold that painters have used for
the haloes of saints is forced by alliteration to agree with the
gash and gall of their self-tortures ; from this precarious triumph
we fall again, with vermilion, to bleeding. 1
 
In great contrast with this proud but helpless suffering is a
doctrinal poem by George Herbert, which uses the same methods.
In 'The Sacrifice,' with a magnificence he never excelled, the
various sets of conflicts in the Christian doctrine of the Sacrifice
are stated with an assured and easy simplicity, a reliable and un-
assuming grandeur, extraordinary in any material, but unique as
achieved by successive fireworks of contradiction, and a mind
jumping like a flea. Herbert's poems are usually more * personal '
and renaissance than this one, in which the theological system is
accepted so completely that the poet is only its mouthpiece.
 
1 Nearly all this analysis is only putting in the background ; the test is
buckle. What would Hopkins have said if he could have been shown this
analysis ? It is, perhaps, the only really disagreeable case in the book. If ]
am right, I am afraid he would have denied with anger that heViad meam
* like a bicycle wheel/ and then after much conscientious self-torture woulc
have suppressed the whole poem.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 227
 
Perhaps this, as a releasing and reassuring condition, is necessary
if so high a degree of ambiguity is to seem normal. For, to this
extent, the poem is outside the 'conflict* theory of poetry; it
assumes, as does its theology, the existence of conflicts, but its
business is to state a generalised solution of them. Here, then,
the speaker is Jesus, the subject doctrinal, and the method that
strange monotony of accent, simplicity of purpose, and rarefied
intensity of feeling, which belong to a scholastic abstraction,
come to life on the stage of a miracle play.
 
They did accuse me of great villainy
That I did thrust into the Deitie ;
Who never thought that any robberie ;
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
Some said that I the temple to the floore
In three days razed, and raised as before.
Why, he that built the world can do much more.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
He is speaking with pathetic simplicity, an innocent surprise
that people should treat him so, and a complete failure to under-
stand the case against him; thus who in the third line quoted and
he in the seventh make their point by applying equally to / and
the Deitie. But before thinking the situation as simple as the
speaker one must consider the use of the word rased to apply to
the two opposite operations concerned ; and that the quotation
from Jeremiah which makes the refrain refers in the original not
to the Saviour but to the wicked city of Jerusalem, abandoned by
God, and in the hands of her enemies for her sins.
 
Then they condemn me all, with that same breath
Which I do give them daily, unto death;
Thus Adam my first breathing rendereth :
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
Hark how they cry aloud still Crucify,
He is not fit to live a day, they cry;
Who cannot live less than eternally.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
Me ally 'they all condemn me, they condemn the whole of me
(I am Jerusalem and include them), they condemn me unto the
total death of which I am not capable, they condemn me and
 
 
 
228 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
thus call down their own destruction, I give them breath daily
till their death, and unto death finally shall I give them* ; so that
rendereth includes 'repay me for my goodness 1 and 'give up the
ghost/ both at their eventual death and in their now killing me.
The same fusion of the love of Christ and the vindictive terrors
of the sacrificial idea turns up in his advice to his dear friends not
to weep for him, for because he has wept for both, when in
his agony they abandoned him, they will need their tears for
themselves. e
 
Weep not dear friends, since I for both have wept
When all my tears were blood, the while you slept,
Your tears for your own fortunes should be kept.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
In each case, of course, the stress of the main meaning is on the
loving-kindness of Jesus ; it is only because this presentment of
the sacrificial idea is so powerfully and beautifully imagined that
all its impulses are involved.
 
Now heal thyself, Physician, now come down ;
Alas, I did so, when I left my crown
And father's smile for you, to feel his frown.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
The secondary meaning ('to make you feel') is a later refinement,
and the Williams manuscript reads 'to feel for you.'
 
The last verse of all contains as strong and simple a double
meaning:
 
But now I die; Now, all is finished.
My woe, man's weal; and now I bow my head:
Only let others say, when I am dead,
Never was grief like mine.
 
English has no clear form for the Oratio Obliqua. He may wish
that his own grief may never be exceeded among the humanity
he pities, 'After the death of Christ, may there never be a grief
like Christ's ' ; he may, incidentally, wish that they may say this,
that he may be sure of recognition, and of a church that will be
a sounding-board to his agony; or he may mean mine as a
quotation from the others, ' Only let there be a retribution, only
let my torturers say never was grief like theirs, in the day when
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 229
 
my agony shall be exceeded/ (Better were it for that man if he
had never been born.)
 
I am not sure how far people would be wiling to accept this
double meaning ; I am only sure that after you have once appre-
hended it, after you have felt this last clash as a sound, you will
never be able to read the poem without remembering that it is
a possibility. For the resultant meaning of this apparently
complete contradiction, one must consider the way it is used as a
religious doctrine; * Christ has made all safe, a weight is off our
shoulders, and it is for that very reason far more urgent that we
should be careful. Salvation is by Faith, and this gives an in-
tolerable importance to Works. O death, where is thy sting;
because the second death is infinitely terrible.' You may say the
pious Herbert could not have intended such a contradiction,
because he would have thought it blasphemous, and because he
took a 'sunny' view of his religion. Certainly it is hard to say
whether a poet is conscious of a particular implication in his
work, he has so many other things to think of; but for the first
objection, it is merely orthodox to make Christ to insist on the
damnation of the wicked (though it might be blasphemous,
because disproportionate, to make him insist on it here without
insisting more firmly at the same time on its opposite) ; and for
the second objection, it is true George Herbert is a cricket in the
sunshine, but one is accustomed to be shocked on discovering
the habits of such creatures; they are more savage than they
seem. 1
 
A memory of the revengeful power of Jehovah gives resonance
to the voice of the merciful power of Jesus, even when verbal
effects so pretty as these last cannot be found :
 
Herod in judgment sits, while I do stand ;
Examines me with a censorious hand.
I him obey, who all things else command.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
1 The poem makes the suffering and yearning Christ say * I am the Lord
of Hosts * * who never yet whom I would punish missed * * they in me
deny themselves all pity ' ' see how spite cankers things.* The analysis
is not digging up anything hidden. This, however, is not to say that Herbert
would have passed it for print. It seems he sometimes had readers' work
passed or to him by the licensing authorities, and it would be natural for him
to consider whether I ought to be published, not whether he ought to have
been.
 
 
 
230 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
Even in so quiet a line as the second, me is made to ring out with
a triumphant and scornful arrogance 'the absurdity of the
thing * and ther/5 is a further echo from the former dispensation
in that his attitude of deference before Herod is one would give
full play to his right hand and his stretched-out arm; that he
will be far more furious in his judgment than his judges; that
one would stand to exert, as well as to suffer, power.
 
Why, Caesar is their only king, not I.
He clave the stony rock when they were dry ;
But surely not their hearts, as I well try.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
It is by its concentration that this is so powerful. The first
line is part of his defence to his judges : ' 1 am not a political
agitator/ In the bitterness of this apology, that his kingdom is
not of this world, he identifies Caesar with Moses as the chosen
leader of Israel ('Oh no, it was Caesar who gave them the water
of life ; I am only an honest subject '), and by this irony both the
earthly power of the conqueror and the legal rationalism of the
Pharisees are opposed both to the profounder mercy of the
Christ and to the profounder searchings of heart that he causes ;
I may cleave their hearts with my tenderness or with their despair.
 
Ah, how they scourge me ! yet my tenderness
Doubles each lash ; and yet their bitterness
Winds up my grief to a mysteriousness.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
Doubles^ because I feel pain so easily, because I feel it painful
that they should be so cruel, because I feel it painful they should
be so unjust, because my tenderness enrages them, because my
tenderness (being in fact power) will return equally each stroke
upon them, because I take upon myself those pains also. Mys-
teriousness, because the bitterness in them or (for various reasons)
due to them produces grief no one can fathom, or because it
dramatises that grief into a form that can show itself (as in
initiation to the Mysteries) to a crowd (as the scourgers also are
a crowd), wound up like a string to give out music, and echoing
in the mind, repeatable, as a type of suffering.
 
Behold they spit on me in scornful wise
Who with my spittle gave the blind man eyes,
Leaving his blindness to mine enemies.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 231
 
Leaving his blindness wilfully, the conceit implies, as a cruel
judgment upon my enemies, that they should in consequence spit
upon me and so commit sin. (Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do.) These two events are contrasted, but
that they should spit upon me is itself a healing; by it they dis-
tinguish me as scapegoat, and assure my triumph and their
redemption; and spitting, in both cases, was to mark my unity
with man. Only the speed, isolation, and compactness of
Herbert's method could handle in this way impulses of such
reach and complexity.
 
Then on my head a crown of thorns I wear,
For these are all the grapes Zion doth bear,
Though I my vine planted and watered there.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
So sits the earth's great curse in Adam's fall
Upon my head, so I remove it all
From the earth on to my brows, and bear the thrall.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
The thorns of the curse upon Adam, the wild grapes of the
wicked city against which Isaiah thundered destruction, and the
crown of vmi-leaves of the Dionysiac revellers (and their de-
scendants the tragedians), all this is lifted on to the head of the
Christ from a round world, similar to it, in the middle distance;
the world, no longer at the centre of man's vision, of Copernican
astronomy. The achievement here is not merely that all these
references are brought together, but that they are kept in their
frame, of monotonous and rather naive pathos, of fixity of doc-
trinal outlook, of heartrending and straightforward grandeur.
 
They bow their knees to me, and cry, Hail, King!
Whatever scoffs or scornfulness can bring
I am the floor, the sink, where they it fling.
Was ever grief like mine?
 
Yet since man's sceptres are as frail as reeds,
And thorny all their crowns, bloody their deeds,
I, who am Truth, turn into truth their deeds.
Was ever grief like mine?
 
I, out of my mercy making their sins as few as possible, reflect
 
 
 
232 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
that I am indeed a king, and so worthy of mockery; because all
kings are as inferior (weak, outcast, or hated) as this; because
I am king of kings, and all kings are inferior to me ; or because
from my outcast kingship of mockery all real kingship takes its
strength (the divine right of kings, for instance, and the relief of
popular irritation under lords of misrule). He has united Herod
and Pilate, 'whose friendship is his enmity/ and his scarlet robe
of princes shows that only his blood 'can repair man's decay.'
 
Oh all ye who pass by, behold and see ;
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree,
The tree of life, to all but only me.
Was ever grief like mine ?
 
The first line now at last, with an effect of apotheosis, gives
the complete quotation from Jeremiah. He climbs the tree to
repay what was stolen, as if he was putting the apple back; but
the phrase in itself implies rather that he is doing the stealing,
that so far from sinless he is Prometheus and the criminal.
Either he stole on behalf of man (it is he who appeared to be
sinful, and was caught up the tree) or he is climbing upwards,
like Jack on the Beanstalk, and taking his people with him back
to Heaven. The phrase has an odd humility which makes us
see him as the son of the house ; possibly Herbert is drawing on
the medieval tradition that the Cross was, made of the wood of
the forbidden trees. Jesus seems a child in this metaphor,
because he is the Son of God, because he can take the apples
without actually stealing (though there is some doubt about this),
because of the practical and domestic associations of such a
necessity, and because he is evidently smaller than Man, or at
any rate than Eve, who could pluck the fruit without climbing.
This gives a pathetic humour and innocence (except ye receive
the Kingdom of Heaven as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter
therein); on the other hand, the son stealing from his father's
orchard is a symbol of incest ; in the person of the Christ the
supreme act of sin is combined with the supreme act of virtue.
Thus in two ways, one behind the other, the Christ becomes
guilty; and we reach the final contradiction:
 
Lo here I hang, charged with a world of sin
The greater world of the two . . .
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 333
 
as the complete Christ ; scapegoat and tragic hero ; loved because
hated; hated because godlike; freeing from torture because
tortured ; torturing his torturers because all-merci/ul ; source of
all strength to men because by accepting he exaggerates their
weakness; and, because outcast, creating the possibility of
society.
 
Between two theeves I spend my utmost breath,
 
As he that for some robberie suffereth.
 
Alas ! what have I stolen from you ? Death :
x Was ever grief like mine ?
 
Herbert deals in this poem, on the scale and by the methods
necessary to it, with the most complicated and deeply-rooted
nofion of the human mind.
 
 
 
VIII
 
I MUST devote a final chapter to some remarks about what
I have been doing; about the conditions under which ambig-
uity is proper, about the degree to which the understanding of
it is of immediate importance, and about the way in which it is
apprehended.
 
For the first of these the preface to Oxford Poetry > 1917, stated
an opposition very clearly; that there is a logical conflict, be-
tween the denotary and the connotatory sense of words; between,
that is to say, an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping
words of all association and a hedonism tending to kill language
by dissipating their sense under a multiplicity of associations.'
The methods I have been using seem to assume that all poetical
language is debauched into associations to any required degree;
I ought at this point to pay decent homage to the opposing power.
 
Evidently all the subsidiary meanings must be relevant, be-
cause anything (phrase, sentence, or poem) meant to be con-
sidered as a unit must be unitary, must stand for a single order
of the mind. In complicated situations this unity is threatened ;
you are thinking of several things, or one thing as it is shown by
several things, or one thing in several ways. A sort of unity may
be given by the knowledge of a scheme on which all the things
occur; so that the scheme itself becomes the one thing which is
being considered. More generally one may say that if an ambig-
uity is to be unitary there must be 'forces' holding its elements
together, and I ought then, in considering ambiguities, to have
discussed what the forces were, whether they were adequate.
But the situation here is like the situation in my first chapter,
about rhythm; it is hard to show in detail how the rhythm acts,
and one can arrive at the same result by showing the effects of
the rhythm upon the meaning of the words.
 
Some sort of parallel may be found in the way logical connect-
ives (the statement of logical form in addition to logical content)
are usually unnecessary and often misleading, because too simple.
Omitting an adjective one would need 'therefore/ stressing the
adjective 'although' ; both logical connections are implied if the
sentences are just put one after another. In the same way, people
 
234
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 235
 
are accustomed to judge automatically the forces that hold
together a variety of ideas ; they feel they know about the forces,
if they have analysed the ideas ; many forces, indeejl, are covertly
included within ideas ; and so of the two elements, each of which
defines the other, it is much easier to find words for the ideas
than for the forces. Most of the ambiguities I have considered
here seem to me beautiful; I consider, then, that I have shown
by example, in showing the nature of the ambiguity, the nature
of the fcfrces which are adequate to hold it together. It would
seem very ahificial to do it the other way round, and very tedious
to do it both ways at once. 1 I wish only, then, to say here that
such vaguely imagined * forces' are essential to the totality of a
poem, and that they cannot be discussed in terms of ambiguity,
because they are complementary to it. But by discussing
ambiguity, a great deal may be made clear about them. In
particular, if there is contradiction, it must imply tension; the
more prominent the contradiction,- the greater the tension; in
some way other than by the contradiction, the tension must be
conveyed, and must be sustained. .
 
An ambiguity, then, is not satisfying in itself, nor is it, con-1
sidered as a device on its own, a thing to be attempted; it must'
in each case arise from, and be justified by, the peculiar require-
ments of the situation. On the other hand, it is a thing which
the more interesting and valuable situations are more likely to
justify. Thus the practice of * trying not to be ambiguous* has a
great deal to be said for it, and I suppose was followed by most of
the poets I have considered. It is likely to lead to results more
direct, more communicable, and hence more durable; it is
necessary safeguard against being ambiguous without proper
occasion, and it leads to more serious ambiguities when such
occasions arise. But, of course, the phrase 'trying not to be
ambiguous* is itself very indefinite and treacherous; it involves
problems of all kinds as to what a poet can try to do, how much
of his activity he is conscious of, and how much of his activity he
could become conscious of if he tried. I believe that the methods
I have been describing are very useful to critics, but certainly
 
1 I was claiming here a purity I had failed to attain. Many of the analyses
in the bookre, I should say, convincing, if at all, through consideration of
forces known *o be at work in the poet's mind, not by the verbal details used
in illustration of them. However, this doesn't affect the theoretical distinction.
 
 
 
236 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
they leave a poet in a difficult position. Even in prose the belief
in them is liable to produce a sort of doctrinaire sluttishness ;
one is tempted to set down a muddle in the hope that it will
convey the meaning more immediately.
 
As for the immediate importance of the study of ambiguity,
it would be easy enough to take up an alarmist attitude, and say
that the English language needs nursing by the analyst very
badly indeed. Always rich and dishevelled, it is fast becoming
very rich and dishevelled ; always without adequate ddVices for
showing the syntax intended, it is fast throwing afoay the few
devices it had ; it is growing liable to mean more things, and less
willing to stop and exclude the other possible meanings. A brief
study of novels will show that English, as spoken by educated
people, has simplified its grammar during the last century to an
extraordinary degree. People sometimes say that words are now
used as flat counters, in a way which ignores their delicacy; that
English is coming to use fewer of its words, and those more
crudely. But this journalist flatness does not mean that the
words have simple meanings, only that the word is used, as at a
distance, to stand for a vague and complicated mass of ideas and
systems which the journalist has no time to apprehend. The
sciences might be expected to diminish the ambiguity of the
language, both because of their tradition of clarity and because
much of their jargon has, if not only one meaning, at any rate
only one setting and point of view. But such words are not in
general use ; they only act as a further disturbing influence on
the words used already. English is becoming an aggregate of
vocabularies only loosely in connection with one another, which
yet have many words in common, so that there is much danger of
accidental ambiguity, and you have to bear firmly in mind the
small clique for whom the author is writing. It is to combat this
that so much recent writing has been determinedly unintelligible
from any but the precise point of view intended.
 
Of the increasing vagueness, compactness, and lack of logical
distinctions in English, the most obvious example is the news-
paper headline. I remember a very fine one that went
 
ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER. t
 
r
 
Here we have the English language used as a Chinese system of
 
 
 
* SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 237
 
flat key-words, given particular meaning by noun-adjectives in
apposition, or perhaps rather as an agglutinative system, one
word one sentence, like Esquimo. I am told that American head-
lines, however mysterious, are usually sentences; the English
method is more complete. Bomb and plot, you notice, can be
either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives,
not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first
that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been
left out s in telegrams : ' I will tell you for your penny about the
Italian AssSfcsin and the well-known Bomb Plot Disaster*; but
the assassin, as far as I remember, was actually not an Italian;
Italian refers to the whole aggregate, and its noun, if any, is
disaster. Perhaps, by being so far separated from its noun, it
gives the impression that the other words, too, are somehow
connected with Italy \ that bombs, plots, and disasters belong
both to government and rebel in those parts; perhaps Italian
Assassin is not wholly separate in one's mind from the injured
Mussolini. This extended use of the adjective acts as a sort of
syncopation, which gives energy and excitement to the rhythm,
rather like the effect of putting two caesuras into a line ; but, of
course, the main rhythm conveys : * This is a particularly exciting
sort of disaster, the assassin-bomb-plot type they have in Italy/
and there is a single chief stress on bomb.
 
Evidently this is a very effective piece of writing, quite apart
from the fact that it conveys its point in a form short enough for
large type. It conveys it with a compactness which gives the
mind several notions at one glance of the eye, with a unity like
that of metaphor, with a force like that of its own favourite
bombs. Nor can I feel that it will be a disaster if other forms of
English literature adopt this fundamental mode of statement, so
interesting to the logician ; it is possible that a clear analysis of
the possible modes of statement, and a fluid use of grammar
which sets out to combine them as sharply as possible into the
effect intended, may yet give back something of the Elizabethan
energy to what is at present a rather exhausted language. The
grammatical sentence is not the only form of statement in modern
English, and I want to suggest that the machinery I have been
using updi poetry is going to become increasingly necessary if
we are to keep the language under control.
 
 
 
238 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
I am not sure that I have been approaching this matter with
an adequate skeleton of metaphysics. For instance, Mr. Richards
distinguishes p poem into Sense, Feeling, Tone, and Intention;
you may say an interpretation is not being done properly (if the
analyst has conquered the country, still he is not ruling it) unless
these four are separated out into sub-headings and the shades of
grammar that convey the contents of each sub-heading are then
listed in turn. But the process of apprehension, both of the
poem and of its analysis, is not at all like reading a list; one
wants as far as clarity will allow to say things in the form in
which they will be remembered when properly digested. People
remember a complex notion as a sort of feeling that involves
facts and judgments ; one cannot give or state the feeling directly,
any more than the feeling of being able to ride a bicycle; it is
the result of a capacity, though it might be acquired perhaps by
reading a list. But to state the fact and the judgment (the
thought and the feeling) separately, as two different relevant
matters, is a bad way of suggesting how they are combined; it
makes the reader apprehend as two things what he must, in fact,
apprehend as one thing. Detailed analysis of this kind might
be excellent as psychology, but it would hardly be literary
criticism; it would start much further back; and a mere reader
of the poem would have to read a great deal of it to get the
information he wanted.
 
This notion of unity is of peculiar importance; not only,
though chiefly, in poetry, but in all literature and most con-
versation. One may remember, rather as a comparison than as
an explanation, what Pavlov found in the brains of his dogs;
that stimulation of a particular region produced inhibition,
almost immediately, over regions in the neighbourhood, and at
the region itself a moment later. Thus to say a thing in two parts
is different in incalculable ways from saying it as a unit; Cole-
ridge says somewhere that the mind insists on having a single
word for a single mental operation, and will use an inadequate
word rather than two adequate ones. When you are holding a
variety of things in your mind, or using for a single matter a
variety of intellectual machinery, the only way of applying all
your criteria is to apply them simultaneously; the only way of
forcing the reader to grasp your total meaning is to arrange that
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 239
 
he can only feel satisfied if he is bearing all the elements in mind
at the moment of conviction; the only way of not giving some-
thing heterogeneous is to give something whicji is at every
point a compound.
 
My third heading is more important, as to the way in which
ambiguity is apprehended. I have continually employed a
method of analysis which jumps the gap between two ways of
thinking; which produces a possible set of alternative meanings
with soifie ingenuity, and then says it is grasped in the pre-
consciousneis of the reader by a native effort of the mind. This
must seem very dubious; but then the facts about the appre-
hension of poetry are in any case very extraordinary. Such an
assumption is best judged by the way it works in detail; I shall
only try here to make it seem plausible.
 
We think not in words but in directed phrases, and yet in
accepting a syntax there is a preliminary stage of uncertainty;
'the grammar may be of such or such a kind; the words are
able to be connected in this way or in that.' Words are seen as
already in a grammar rather as letters are seen as already in a
word, but one is much more prepared to have been wrong about
the grammar than about the word. Under some drugs that make
things jump about you see any particular thing moving or placed
elsewhere in proportion as it is likely to move or be placed else-
where, in proportion to a sort of coefficient of mobility which
you have already given it as part of your apprehension. In the
same way, a plausible grammar is picked up at the same time
as the words it orders, but with a probability attached to it, and
the less probable alternatives, ready, if necessary, to take its
place, are in some way present at the back of your mind.
 
In poetry much stress is laid on such alternatives; * getting to
know' a poet is largely the business of learning to control them.
And as, to take another coefficient which the eye attaches to
things, as you have an impression of a thing's distance away,
which can hardly ever be detached from the pure visual sensa-
tion, and. when it is so detached leaves your eye disconcerted (if
what you took for a wall turns out to be the sea, you at first see
nothing, perhaps are for a short time puzzled as with a blur, and
then see differently), so the reading of a new poet, or of any
poetry at alT, fills many readers with a sense of mere embarrass-
 
 
 
240 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
ment and discomfort, like that of not knowing, and wanting to
know, whether it is a wall or the sea.
 
It is these faint and separate judgments of probability which
unite, as if with an explosion, to 'make sense* and accept the
main meaning of a connection of phrases; and the reaction,
though rapid, is not as immediate as one is liable to believe.
Also, as in a chemical reaction, there will have been reverse or
subsidiary reactions, or small damped explosions, or slow wide-
spread reactions, not giving out much heat, going 01* concur-
rently, and the final result may be complicated by^preliminary
stages in the main process, or after-effects from the products of
the reaction. As a rule, all that you recognise as in your mind
is the one final association of meanings which seems sufficiently
rewarding to be the answer 'now I have understood that y \ it
is only at intervals that the strangeness of the process can be
observed. I remember once clearly seeing a word so as to under-
stand it, and, at the same time, hearing myself imagine that I
had read its opposite. In the same way, there is a preliminary
stage in reading poetry when the grammar is still being settled,
and the words have not all been given their due weight; you
have a broad impression of what it is all about, but there are
various incidental impressions wandering about in your mind;
these may not be part of the final meaning arrived at by the
judgment, but tend to be fixed in it as part of its colour. In the
same way, there is a preliminary stage in writing poetry, when
not all the grammar, but the grammar at crucial points of contact
between different ideas, is liable to be often changed. There is
a trivial but typical example of this in the two versions of the
Crashaw Hymn for the Circumcision of our Lord.
 
All the purple pride of Laces ,
 
The crimson curtaines of thy bed ;
Guild thee not with so sweet graces ;
 
Nor set thee in so rich a red.
 
All the purple pride that laces
 
The crimson curtains of thy bed,
Guilds thee not in so sweet graces
 
Nor setts thee in so rich a red.
 
I have assumed that much could be extracted from the fact
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 241
 
that one syntax rather than another was selected for a poetical
statement ; this example shows the limitations of such a method.
For, clearly, the verse is altered very little by these quite con-
siderable changes in the grammar ; it would be easy in a rapid
reading to think they had been the same. It does not make
much difference whether laces the noun or the verb is used,
because, though their meaning is different, each reminds the
reader of the other. So for the corresponding change in guild,
it does Yiot matter whether this is said to be done by the pride or
by the upholstery which expresses it; whichever syntax is
chosen, the reader thinks of the guilding as done, in their re-
spective ways, by both. Thus each of these versions includes
the other among its possibilities; probably there is a stage for
most readers when they have not yet noticed which syntax is, in
fact, used. This example of the complexity of the absorption
of grammar in poetry may be convincing because so simple ; it
shows, by the way, what I have said already, that a poetical effect
is not easily disturbed by altering a few words.
 
One should also consider, not merely whether this generalising
of the grammar at first occurs, but how scrupulously it is cleaned
away ; how far, then, an attention to it will be profitable. Clearly,
the critical principles of the author and of the public he is writing
for will decide this to a considerable degree, and one has to bear
them in mind in deciding whether a particular ambiguity is part
of the total effect intended. (This is hardly a solemn warning,
because they have to be borne in mind in any case.) Thus it is
fair to hold the seventeenth century responsible for most of its
ambiguities, because its taste seems to have been curiously free
from such critical principles as interpose a judgment before
the experience of accepting the poetry is completed. On the
other hand, it would often be unprofitable to insist on the
ambiguities of Pope, because he expected his readers to prune
their minds of any early disorder as carefully as he had pruned
his own. My eighteenth-century examples, therefore, have
to depend on variations of grammar the authors would have
thought trivial, puns which they had intended and thought
intelligible, and variations of sense which spring from an effective
superfici ility in their thought. But, in the same way, one must
often ignore ambiguities in the seventeenth century, because
o
 
 
 
242 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
they would be irrelevant to the total effect intended and so were
 
not absorbed.
 
Ben Jonson's most famous poem gives a puzzling example of
this:
 
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
 
And I will pledge with mine ;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And Fll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
 
Doth ask a drink divine ;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine.
 
The last two lines say the opposite of what is meant; I must
take some credit for not putting this well-known case into tfie
seventh type of ambiguity. 1 But one has already decided from
the rest of the verse that a simple lyrism is intended ; there are
no other two-faced implications of any plausibility, and the word
but, after all, admits of only one form for the antithesis. This is
not to say that the last two lines are an accident, and should be
altered; you may feel it gives a touching completeness to his
fervour that he feels so sure no one will misunderstand him.
And indeed, you may take the matter more seriously, so as to
regard these lines as a true statement of two opposites. You may
say that the irrelevant meaning was one to which Jonson was
much better accustomed; that he may have been echoing, for
the purposes of lyrism, some phrase he had used already at the
Mermaid, to express poetical rather than amorous ambition;
that he might then not notice till too late about the grammar;
that in this sort of lyric, whose business it is to be whole-hearted
to an exhausting degree, a man would naturally draw on any
generous enthusiasm he had already phrased to himself warmly;
and that, at any rate, the lines are a true hyperbole, since Jonson
did very seriously feel the thirst of the soul for the divine draught
of poetry. All this may be true, and these facts very interesting
to the biographer, but they have nothing to do with the enjoy-
ment of the poem. Of course, such a distinction is hard to draw,
and those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers, but this
extreme example may serve to make clear that it is not all
 
1 The last two lines, unlike the rest, are not a translation ; u^o one can't
settle the question that wav.
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 243
 
significant ambiguities which are relevant, that I am talking less
about the minds of poets than about the mode of action of poetry.
 
This seems an important point, because I am treating the act
of communication as something very extraordinary, so that the
next step would be to lose faith in it altogether. It might seem
more reasonable, when dealing with obscure alternatives of
syntax', to abandon the claim that you are explaining a thing
communicated, to say either that you are showing what happened
in the author's mind (this should interest the biographer) or
what was likely to happen in a reader's mind (this should interest
the poet). This might be more tidy, but, like many forms of
doubt, it would itself claim to know too much; the rules as to
what is conveyable are so much more mysterious even than the
rules governing the effects of ambiguity, whether on the reader
or the author, that it is better to talk about both parties at once,
and be thankful if what you say is true about either.
 
The problem as to belief in poetry might well be mentioned
here ; as to whether it is necessary to share the opinions of the
poet if you are to understand his sensibility. Very often it is
necessary to believe them in a behaviouristic sense; you have
to be well enough habituated to them to be able to imagine their
consequences ; thus you have to be a person who is liable to act
as if they were true. Certainly, if this is so, it becomes puzzling
that we should be able to enjoy so many poets. The explanation
seems to be that in the last few generations literary people have
been trained socially to pick up hints at once about people's
opinions, and to accept them, while in the company of their
owners, with as little fuss as possible ; I might say, putting this
more strongly, that in the present state of indecision of the
cultured world people do, in fact, hold all the beliefs, however
contradictory, that turn up in poetry, in the sense that they are
liable to use them all in coming to decisions. It is for reasons of
this sort that the habit of reading a wide variety of different sorts
of poetry, which has, after all, only recently been contracted by
any public as a whole, gives to the act of appreciation a puzzling
complexity, tends to make people less sure of their own minds,
and makes it necessary to be able to fall back on some intelligible
process (|F interpretation. Thus one finds it hard, in reading
some pass%es of Keats, to realise that they were long enjoyed
o*
 
 
 
244 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
empirically, without the theoretical reassurance now given by the
psycho-analysts ; the same applies to the * anthropological ' writings
of mystics, like those lines from Crashaw in my last chapter.
 
One's situation here is very like that of the visualiser who
cannot imagine enjoying poetry without seeing the pictures on
which he relies; any intellectual framework that seems relevant
is very encouraging (as one sees from the cocksureness of the
scientists) whether it actually 'explains' anything or not; if you
feel that your reactions could be put into a rational scheme that
you can roughly imagine, you become willing, for Instance, to
abandon yourself to the ecstasies of the Romantic Movement,
with a much lower threshold of necessary excitement, with much
less fear for your critical self-respect. Thus it is very greatly *vo
the credit of the eighteenth century that it accepted Shakespeare ;
indeed Dr. Johnson was much more sure that his humour was
first-rate (nobody wants to feel a joke could be explained) than
that his methods of rousing the more far-reaching sentiments of
tragedy were to be admitted. The same machinery of reassur-
ance, I suppose, is sought for in my use of phrases like ' outside
the focus of consciousness,' without very definite support from
psychological theory. To give a reassurance of this kind, indeed,
is the main function of criticism.
 
Many people who would admit that there is a great deal of
ambiguity in poetry, and that it is important, will consider that
I have gone on piling up ambiguities on to particular cases till
the 'whole thing' becomes absurd ; 'you can't expect us to be-
lieve all that.' I have, in fact, been as complete as I could in
cases that seemed to deserve it, and considered whether each of
the details was reasonable, not whether the result was reasonable
as a whole. For these analytical methods are usually employed
casually and piecemeal, with an implication that the critic has
shown tact by going no further; if they are flung together into a
heap they make, I think, rather a different impression, and this
at any rate is a test to which it is proper that they should be
subjected. If the reader has found me expounding the obvious
and accepted at tedious length, he must remember that English
literary critics have been so unwilling to appear niggling and
lacking in soul that upon these small technical points thV obvious,
even the accepted, has been said culpably seldom.
 
 
 
> SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 245
 
This attitude, however, can be justified; the position of a
literary critic is far more a social than a scientific one. There is
no question of dealing finally with the matter, because, in so far
as people are always reading an author, he is always being read
differently. It is the business of the critic to extract for s his public
what it wants; to organise, what he may indeed create, the taste
of his period. So that literature, in so far as it is a living matter,
demands a sense, not so much of what is really there, as of what
is neceSsary to carry a particular situation 'off.' Detailed ex-
planation, In the literary as in the social field, calls up a reaction
of suspicion ; ' Why is he wasting our time, nagging us about this
thing, when everybody knows it is all right ? What good will it
lib?' In the same way, the analyst must be humbled by that
story about Proust asking his duchesses why and how they came
into a drawing-room like duchesses; they could not tell him,
and the only result was to make them laugh when they saw him
come into a drawing-room himself. It does not even satisfy the
understanding to stop living in order to understand.
 
This social comparison or derivation may be worked out in
some detail, and involves the problems of my first chapter. Thus
the relation of Meaning to Pure Sound is very closely paralleled
by the relation of Character to Looks; this may serve to show
how very completely one may have to behave, in practice, as if
the theory of Pure Sound was true. The fundamental source of
pleasure about Looks is an apprehension of Character; a change
in one's knowledge of the Character alters (by altering the
elements selected) one's apprehension of the Looks. The
Beauty resides in the Sound and the Looks; but these, being
aesthetic constructions, are largely distillations (solutions into
forms immediately conceivable) from the Meaning and the
Character.
 
As to say that the Meaning (rather than the Sound) is what
matters about poetry, so it seems very intellectual and puritanical
to say that Character (rather than Looks) is what matters about
people; -in both cases those who do so can save the phenomena
by invoking first pre-conscious and then instinctive modes of
apprehension ; in both cases they are using, for the satisfaction
of the mfcd, words belonging to the more intelligible part of a
scale about the whole scale. And both involve the intellectual
 
 
 
246 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
fallacy that regards the mind as something otherwise passive
that collects propositions; or the assumption that truth is valu-
able in the abstract rather than as something digested so as to
be useful. In both cases one can partly get over this by saying
that it is less the Meaning that matters than 'what it means to
you,' that it is less the Character itself that is apprehended than
its possible relations with your own. And, of course, in both
cases, the distinction which I am teasing so pitilessly is largely a
verbal one which most people regard as indifferent; some one
may say he reads Swinburne for the Sound and George Herbert
for the Meaning, but he would not eagerly deny that he reads
them both for Meaning conveyed in different ways ; a business
man engaging a secretary may feel a distinction between Look
and Character, but he would not find it absurd to call this a
distinction between two sorts of character estimated in terms
of Looks.
 
A reader may have regarded this parallel as a kind of theoretical
joke; if so, it will have been misleading, because as a joke it
involves a moral element and depends on an ambiguity. In both
cases there is a noble-naughty scale (corresponding in part to the
power of the thing to survive analysis if it could be analysed), and
also an intellectual-instinctive scale (corresponding in part to the
ease or difficulty with which such analysis could be performed) ;
in both cases it is a naive intellectualism or Puritanism which
mixes the two scales up together. I must confess it is not very
far from this fallacy to make the assumption in the first bracket ;
to say, as I did in my first chapter, that only bad poems are hurt
by analysis (p. 16). There is no necessary reason why this should
be true, and it is worth noticing an important class of readers
for whom it is not.
 
Many works of art give their public a sort of relief and strength,
because they are independent of the moral code which their
public accepts and is dependent on; relief, by fantasy gratifica-
tion; strength, because it gives you a sort of equilibrium within
your boundaries to have been taken outside them, however
secretly, because you know your own boundaries better when you
have seen them from both sides. Such works give a valuable
imaginative experience, and such a public cannot affor d to have
them analysed; the Crashaw poems in my last chapter may be
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 247
 
examples of this state of things. And I suspect that the parallel
of personal with poetical beauty still holds good; that there are
some excellent people who rightly admire their neighbour's
Looks, for valid reasons of Character, which they would find
shocking if they could understand them.
 
Under these rather special circumstances one should try to
prevent people from having to analyse their reactions, with all
the tact at one's disposal ; nor are they so special as might appear.
The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to
maintain one's defences and equilibrium and live as well as one
can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed like this. And
one must remember (since I am saying the best I can for the
enemy) that, as a first approximation, or a general direction, to
people who really do not know how to read poetry, the dogma of
Pure Sound often acts as a recipe for aesthetic receptiveness, and
may be necessary.
 
So that to defend analysis in general one has to appeal to the
self-esteem of the readers of the analysis, and assume that they
possess a quality that is at present much respected. They must
possess a fair amount of equilibrium or fairly strong defences;
they must have the power first of reacting to a poem sensitively
and definitely (one may call that feminine) and 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 detachment not to mind what
their sources of satisfaction may turn out to be. ('Fixed' in the
last sentence is a metaphor from printing snapshots; on second
thoughts, it is better than the microscopical one, because after
all a microscope is not available.) This quality is admired at
present because it gives one a certain power of dealing with
anything that may turn out to be true; and people have come to
feel that that may be absolutely anything. I do not say that this
power is of unique value ; it tends to prevent the sensibility from
having its proper irrigating and fertilising effect upon the person
as a whjle; a medieval sensibility may have been more total and
satisfying than a modern one. But it is widely and reasonably
 
 
 
248 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
felt that those people are better able to deal with our present
difficulties whose defences are strong enough for them to be able
to afford to understand things; nor can I conceal my sympathy
with those who want to understand as many things as possible,
and to hang those consequences which cannot be foreseen.
 
After this statement of preference I must return to what I
have just called its fallacy, and discuss whether the scientific idea
of truth is relevant to poetry at all. I have been trying to analyse
verses which a great variety of critics have enjoyed but only
described in terms of their effects ; thus I have claimed to show
how a properly-qualified mind works when it reads the verses,
how those properly- qualified minds have worked which have not
at all understood their own working. It would be tempting,
then, to say I was concerned with science rather than with
beauty; to treat poetry as a branch of applied psychology. But,
so far as poetry can be regarded altogether dispassionately, so
far as it is an external object for examination, it is dead poetry
and not worth examining; further, so far as a critic has made
himself dispassionate about it, so far as he has repressed sym-
pathy in favour of curiosity, he has made himself incapable of
examining it.
 
This is not simply the old difficulty about what subjects can
be treated by the scientific method; at least, it is here more
difficult. For instance, one might apply the above argument to
medicine; * those bodies which can rightly be regarded dis-
passionately are not worth curing/ This may not seem very
convincing, but it has been argued ; it is the root of the objection
to vivisection, and made the Russian Orthodox Church forbid
the use of medical textbooks. However, there are, on the face of
it, two ways of dealing with bodies; what is found as truth from
bodies not considered valuable is found to work as goodness
upon bodies that are so considered ; and, even more important,
the same body can effectively be considered both ways at once ;
certainly there are difficulties such as appear in the doctor's
objections to psycho-analysis, but the separation is possible.
But poetry is not like bodies, because the act of knowing is itself
an act of sympathising; unless you are enjoying the poetry you
cannot create it, as poetry, in your mind. The scientific idea of
truth is that the mind, otherwise passive, collects propositions
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 249
 
about the outside world; the application of scientific ideas to
poetry is interesting because it reduces that idea of truth (much
more intimately than elsewhere) to a self-contradiction.
 
The human situation is oddly riddled with these antinomies,
and, when they seem completely solved by intuition, there is not
much object in separating them out; thus I have a vague im-
pression that Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is
impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one
finds it difficult to remember them. Still, it seems proper here
to considei how intuition ought to solve this antinomy, to say how
the analysis of pbetry can be useful, and indeed what it can be.
 
On the face of it, there are 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, and sees to it, perhaps by
using longer and plainer language, or by concentrating on one
element of a combination, that his version is more intelligible
than the original to the readers he has in mind. Having been
shown what to look for, they are intended to go back to the
original and find it there for themselves. Parodies are apprecia-
tive criticisms in this sense, and much of Proust reads like the
work of a superb appreciative critic upon a novel which has
unfortunately not survived. The analyst is not a teacher in this
way; he assumes that something has been conveyed to the
reader by the work under consideration, and sets out to explain,
in terms of the rest of the reader's experience, why the work has
had the effect on him that is assumed. As an analyst he is not
repeating the effect; he may even be preventing it from happen-
ing again. Now, evidently the appreciator has got to be an
analyst, because the only way to say a complicated thing more
simply is to separate it into its parts and say each of them in turn.
The analyst has also got to be an appreciator; because he must
convince the reader that he knows what he is talking about (that
he has had the experience which is in question) ; because he must
be able to show the reader which of the separate parts of the
experience he is talking about, after he has separated them; and
because he must coax the reader into seeing that the cause he
names iocs, in fact, produce the effect which is experienced;
otherwise they will not seem to have anything to do with each
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
other. On the other hand, once the analyst has abandoned him-
self to being also an appreciator, he can never be sure that he has
explained anything; if he seems to have explained something, it
may be because he has managed to do the same unexplained
thing over again. Thus, in finding several words to convey the
mode of action of a single word in a poem, I do not, of course,
claim that the new words are any more simple in their action than
the old one ; a word is of the nature of an organism, or of the
nature of the part of an organism; not by a small series of pro-
positions, but by a new piece of writing, must one sharpen a
reader's apprehension of the way it is being used. And yet it is
precisely the nature of a 'piece of writing' which is supposed to
be undergoing analysis.
 
Mention of Sir Richard Paget's tongue-gestures, in my first
chapter, led to an alarming notion; that it was no use trying to
say how a poem came to take effect as it did because one could
not say how much of the effect was being produced by sound-
effects, such as belong to the nature of language and have not
yet been explained in sufficient detail. The answer is that such
an explanation as I have attempted need not be complete because
of the nature of its process; it should imply, by its own writing,
both how much of the effect is produced by the one device
explained and how much is left as at present inexplicable.
 
The process, then, must be that of alternating between, or
playing off against one another, these two sorts of criticism.
When you have made a quotation, you must first show the reader
how you feel about it, by metaphor, implication, devices of sound,
or anything else that will work; on the other hand, when you
wish to make a critical remark, to explain why your quotation
takes effect as it does, you must state your result as plainly (in as
transferable, intellectually handy terms) as you can. You may
say that this distinction is false, because in practice one must do
both at once, but I think it is useful; one can apply it, for in-
stance, to that problem about how much one is to say the obvious
which always seems to hamper the analytical critic.
 
Certainly, in appreciative criticism, where you are trying to
show the reader how you feel about a poetical effect, it is im-
portant not to tease him ; it is annoying to read platitudes in such
work because they interfere with the process, which is essentially
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 251
 
that of repeating the original effect, in a plainer form. But in an
analysis, whose object is to show the modes of action of a poetical
effect, the author may safely insist on the obvious because the
reader feels willing that the process should be complete. Indeed,
it is then as arrogant in the author to hint at a subtlety as to
explain it too fully; firstly, because he implies that those who
do not know it already are not worth his notice; secondly,
because he assumes^that there is no more to know. For some
readers may take the subtlety in question for granted, so they
will think the hint must refer to something still more subtle.
 
Not to explain oneself at length in such a case is a snobbery
in the author and excites an opposing snobbery in the reader;
It is a distressing and common feature of modern aesthetics, due
much more to disorientation and a forlorn sense that the matter
is inexplicable (it is no use appealing to the reason of ordinary
people, one has got to keep up one's dignity) than to any un-
fortunate qualities in the aestheticians. That is one of the
reasons why the cult of irrationalism is such a bore ; analytical
is more cheerful than appreciative criticism (both, of course,
must be present) precisely because there is less need to agonise
over these questions of tone.
 
It may be said that the business of analysis is to progress from
poetical to prosaic, from intuitive to intellectual, knowledge;
evidently these are just the same sort of opposites, in that each
assumes the other is also there. But the idea of this doublet
certainly enshrines some of the advantages of analysis, and it may
be as well to show how I have been using it. You may know
what it will be satisfying to do for the moment ; precisely how
you are feeling; how to express the thing conceived clearly, but
alone, in your mind. That, in its appreciation of, and depend-
ence on, the immediate object or state of mind, is poetical
knowledge. (It is true that poetry is largely the perception of the
relations between several such things, but then it is the relations
which are known poetically.) You may, on the other hand, be
able to put the object known into a field of similar objects, in
some order, so that it has some degree of balance and safety;
you may know several ways of getting to the thing, other things
like it b it different, enough of its ingredients and the way they
are put together to retain control over the situation if some
 
 
 
252 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
are missing or if the conditions are altered; the thing can be
said to your neighbours, and has enough valencies in your mind
for it to be connected with a variety of other things into a variety
of different classes. That, from its administrative point of view,
from its desire to put the thing known into a coherent structure,
is prosaic knowledge. Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived
in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and
useful and might have been used differently.
 
One cannot conceive observation except in terms of compari-
son, or comparison except as based on recognition; immediate
knowledge and past experience presuppose one another; thus
the question in any particular case must be largely as to what is
uppermost in your mind. But this way of using the word-pair
at least gives one an answer against those who say that analysis
is bad for poetry; it often happens that, for historical reasons or
what not, one can no longer appreciate a thing directly by poetical
knowledge, and yet can rediscover it in a more controlled form
by prosaic knowledge.
 
But even if we abandon the oppositions between thought and
feeling, and attend to the intellectual notion of explanation, the
situation is not much more encouraging. It is a matter of luck
whether or not you have in your language or your supply of
intellectual operations anything which, for a particular problem,
will be of use ; and this may be true even in a field of known
limitation, for instance, it is a matter of luck whether you can find
a construction in Euclidean geometry (it would remain so even
if you always could) ; whereas in Analytical geometry there will
always be a way of setting about the proof of a proposition, if it
is a recognisably geometrical one, but it is a matter of luck
whether or not it is too complicated for human patience. And it
is only by chance that these two matters of chance will work out
the same in a particular case. Things temporarily or permanently
inexplicable are not, therefore, to be thought of as essentially
different from things that can be explained in some terms you
happen to have at your disposal; nor can you have reason to
think them likely to be different unless there is a great deal about
the inexplicable things that you already know. Explanations of
literary matters, to elaborate a perhaps rather trivial analogy,
involving as they do much apparently random invention, are
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 253
 
more like Pure than Analytical geometry, and, if you cannot
think of a construction, that may show that you would be wise
to use a different set of methods, but cannot show the problem
is of a new kind.
 
I have been insisting on this because it seems important that
people should believe that such explanations are possible, even
if they have never yet been performed; but the analogy is useful
in another way, through giving the notion of a construction.
Continually, in order to paraphrase a piece of verse, it is neces-
sary to drag in some quite irrelevant conceptions; thus I have
often been puzzied by finding it necessary to go and look things
up in order to find machinery to express distinctions that were
already in my mind; indeed, this is involved in the very notion
of that activity, for how else would one know what to look up ?
Such machinery is necessary, partly so as to look as if you knew
what you were talking about, partly as a matter of 'style,' and
partly from the basic assumption of prose that all the parts of
speech must have some meaning. (These three give the same
idea with increasing generality.) Otherwise, one would be con-
tinually stating relations between unknown or indefinite objects,
or only stating something about such relations, themselves un-
known and indefinite, in a way which probably reflects accur-
ately the nature of your statement, but to which only the pure
mathematician is accustomed. So that many of my explanations
may be demonstrably wrong, and yet efficient for their purpose,
and vice versa.
 
The notion of a construction also shows the dangers of the
process it describes. With a moderate intellectual apparatus one
should be able to draw irrelevant distinctions without limit, and
even those that are of linguistic interest need not be of interest
to a reader of the poem. When a poem refers simply and un-
ambiguously to a field it is usually possible to plant a hedge
across the field, and say triumphantly that two contiguous fields
were being described by an ambiguity. This may be of some use
in that it shows the field to have extension, but one must not
suppose that there is anything in a right apprehension of the
field which corresponds to one's own hedge. Thus I think my
seven types form an immediately useful set of distinctions, but
to a more serious analysis they would probably appear trivial
 
 
 
254 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
and hardly to be distinguished from one another. I call them
useful, not merely as a means of stringing examples, but because,
in complicated matters, any distinction between cases, however
irrelevant, may serve to heighten one's consciousness of the
cases themselves.
 
Since, however, I admit that the analysis of a poem can only
be a long way of saying what is said anyhow by the poem it
analyses, that it does not show how the devices it describes can
be invented or used, that it gives no source of information about
them which can replace that of normal sensibility, and that it is
only tolerable in so far as it is in some way useful, I suppose I
ought, in conclusion, to say what use I think it can be. It need
not be any. Normal sensibility is a tissue of what has been
conscious theory made habitual and returned to the pre-con-
scious, and, therefore, conscious theory may make an addition
to sensibility even though it draws no (or no true) conclusion,
formulates no general theory, in the scientific sense, which
reconciles and makes quickly available the results which it
describes. Such an advance in the machinery of description
makes a reader feel stronger about his appreciations, more
reliably able to distinguish the private or accidental from the
critically important or repeatable, more confident of the reality
(that is, the transferability) of his experiences; adds, in short,
in the mind of the reader to the things there to be described,
whether or not it makes those particular things more describable.
What is needed for literary satisfaction is not, 'this is beautiful
because of such and such a theory/ but 'this is all right; I am
feeling correctly about this ; I know the kind of way in which
it is meant to be affecting me.'
 
Of course, this distinction is not new, but it needs repeating;
indeed, one often finds the surrealist type of critic saying that
poetry would have been just the same if no criticism had ever
been written. So Pope, for instance, would have written just
the same if he had had no critical dogmas. Now it is unwise to
say blankly that a theorist is talking nonsense (for instance, it is
no use saying that all men are not equal) because he may con-
sciously be making a paradox to imply a larger truth; thus, even
here, there would be a little truth in saying that Pope could afford
to forget his dogmas, so deeply had they become part of h'*s
 
 
 
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 255
 
sensibility. And certainly one is again faced with the problem
about the hen and the egg; the dogma produces the sensibility,
but it oust itself have been produced by it. But to say that the
dogma does not influence the sensibility is absurd. People only
say it when they are trying to put the sensibility in a peculiar
state of control over the dogma. The conflict between the
scientific and aesthetic points of view, between which I have been
trying to arbitrate, gives them a reason; people feel uncertain as
to wha^ sort of validity a critical dogma can have, how far one
ought to Le trying to be independent of one's own age, how far
one ought to be trying to be independent of one's own preferences,
and do not want their sensibility to be justified by reasons because
they are afraid that once they start reasoning they will fall into
the wrong point of view. Another such cause, arising out of this,
has been mentioned already; it is only recently that the public,
as a whole, has come to admire a great variety of different styles
of poetry, requiring a great variety of critical dogmas, simultane-
ously, so as to need not so much a single habit for the reading of
poetry as a sort of understanding which enables one to jump
neatly from one style to another. This produces a sort of anxious
watchfulness over the feelings excited by poetry; it is important
not to forget what sort of poetry this is and so allow oneself to
have the wrong feelings.
 
For such reasons, then, it is necessary for us to protect our
sensibility against critical dogma, but it is just because of this
that the reassurance given by some machinery for analysis has
become so necessary in its turn. Thus I suppose that all present-
day readers of poetry would agree that some modern poets are
charlatans, though different people would attach this floating
suspicion to different poets ; but they have no positive machinery,
such as Dr. Johnson thought he had, to a great extent rightly,
by which such a fact could be proved. It is not that such
machinery is unknown so much as that it is unpopular ; people
feel that, because it must always be inadequate, it must always
be unfair. The result is a certain lack of positive satisfaction in
the reading of any poetry; doubt becomes a permanent back-
ground of the mind, both as to whether the thing is being inter-
preted ightly and as to whether, if it is, one ought to allow one-
self to feel pleased. Evidently, in the lack of any machinery of
 
 
 
256 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
 
analysis, such as can be thought moderately reliable, to decide
whether one's attitude is right, this leads to a sterility of emotion
such as makes it hardly worth while to read the poetrj at all.
It is not surprising, then, that this age should need, if not really
an explanation of any one sort of poetry, still the general assur-
ance which comes of a belief that all sorts of poetry may be
conceived as explicable.
 
I should claim, then, that for those who find this book contains
novelties, it will make poetry more beautiful, without their ever
having to remember the novelties, or endeavour to apply them.
It seems a sufficient apology for many niggling pages.
 
 
 
INDEX
 
 
 
Anon., 48, 114, 162
 
Beerbohm, Max, 176-7
Brooke, Rupert, 205
Browning, 20, 28
Byron, ~*
 
Carew, 105, 173
Chaucer, 58-68, 74
Coleridge, 20, 238
Crashaw, 116, 217-24, 240, 246
 
Donne, 51, 71, 124, 139-47,
 
199-200
Dryden, 7, 74-6, 106-7, 1 9%~9>
 
219, 222
 
Eliot, T. S., 62, 77-9, 88, 157-60
 
Fitzgerald, 182
 
Ford, 155
 
Freud, 162, 194, 223, 226
 
Gibbon, 71
Gray, 77, 121-3
Grierson, H. J. C., 140
 
Herbert, 118-19, 129-31, 175,
 
183-4, 218, 224, 226-33
Herrick, 162
Hood, 109-12
Hopkins, G. M., 148, 225
Housman, A. E., 32
 
Johnson, 12, 68, 87, 107-8, 114,
 
12 1 -3, 199, 244, 255
Jonson, 27, 242
 
Keats, 20, 205, 214-17
 
Lovelace . . 209- 1 o
Lyly, 168
 
 
 
Marlowe, 31, 206
Marvell, 80, 104-6, 166-73
Meredith, 20
Milton, 12, 102-4, Ir 3 I 7
 
Nash, 25-7, 115
Nicolson, Harold, 20
 
Paget, Sir Richard, 14-15, 250
 
Peacock, 22
 
Pope, 22, 70-4, 83, 108, 117,
 
125-8, 149-51, 185, 203-4,
 
241
 
Proust, 131, 245, 249
Punch, 65
 
Racine, 6
 
Read, Herbert, 2
 
Richards, I. A., 148, 225, 238
 
Scott, Sir Walter, 118
Shakespeare, 46, 49, 59, 80-8,
 
155, 206
AWs Well that Ends Well, 95,
 
99
 
Conolanus, 42-3, 90, 207
Hamlet, 91, 96-7, 211-14
i Henry IV, 93, 97, 116, 206
Henry V, 112-13
Lear, 45, 89
Macbeth, 18-20, 45, 49, 82-3,
 
101, 200-3, 209
Measure for Measure, 84, 92,
 
100, 155, 180, 202
Merchant of Venice, 43-4
Othello, 90, 93, 94, 185-6
Sonnets, 2, 50-6, 86, 133-8
Troilus and Cressida, 93, 99,
 
178-180, 209
Twelfth Night, 98
 
 
 
257
 
 
 
2S 8 INDEX
 
Shelley, 20, 156-61, "166 Vaughan, 174-5
 
Sidney, 34-8 Vergil, 10
 
Sitwell, Edith, 12-14
 
Spenser, 33-4, 173, 151, 207-8 Waley, Arthur, 23
 
Stein, Gertrude, 7 WildCi Qscar, 187
 
Swinburne, 13, 20, 163-5, 2U Wordsworth, 20, 151-4, 190
 
Synge, 4-5, 38-42
 
Tennyson, 1 1 , 20, 182 Yeats, W. B., 187-90
 
Theobald, 83-6 Young, 108
 
 
 
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at Hopetoun Street, Edinburgh,
 
by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD.
 
Printers to the University of Edinburgh

Revision as of 00:49, 29 October 2007

Seven Types Of Ambiguity

by William Empson

Metadata

  • Copyright: 1949
  • Publisher: Chatto and Windus, LONDON
  • FIRST EDITION 1930
  • SECOND EDITION (REVISED AND RE-SET) 1947
  • REPRINTED 1949

Frontmatter

Contents

Contents

CHAPTER I

The sorts of meaning to be considered; the problems of Pure Sound and of Atmosphere. First-type ambiguities arise when a detail is effective m several ways at once, e.g. by com- parisons with several points of likeness, antitheses with several points of difference (p. 22), * comparative ' adjectives, subdued metaphors, and extra meanings suggested by rhythm. Annex on Dramatic Irony (p. 38).

CHAPTER II

In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one. Double grammar in Shakespeare Sonnets. Ambiguities in Chaucer (p. 58), the eighteenth century, T. S. Eliot. Digressions (p. 80) on emendations of Shakespeare and on his form 'The A and B of C.'

CHAPTER III

The condition for third-type ambiguity is that two apparently unconnected meanings are given simultaneously. Puns from Milton, Marvell, Johnson, Pope, Hood. Generalised form (p. in) when there is reference to more than one universe of discourse; allegory, mutual comparison, and pastoral. Ex- amples from Shakespeare, Nash, Pope, Herbert, Gray. Dis- cussion of the criterion for this type.

CHAPTER IV

In the fourth type the alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author. Complete poems by Shakespeare and Donne considered. Examples (p. 145) of alternative possible emphases in Donne and Hopkins. Pope on dowagers praised. Tintern Abbey accused of failing to achieve this type.

CHAPTER V

The fifth type is a fortunate confusion, as when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing (examples from Shelley) or not holding it all in mind at once (p. 163 ; examples from Swinburne). Argument (p. 166) that later metaphysical poets were approaching nineteenth-century technique by this route; examples from Marvell and Vaughan.

CHAPTER VI

In the sixth type what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced to invent interpretations. Examples from f Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Tennyson, Herbert (p. 183), Pope, Yeats. Discussion of the criterion for this type and its bearing on nineteenth-century technique.

CHAPTER VII

The seventh type is that of full contradiction, marking a divi- sion in the author's mind. Freud invoked. Examples (pp. 198-211) of minor confusions in negation and opposition. Seventh-type ambiguities from Shakespeare, Keats, Crashaw, Hopkins, and Herbert.

CHAPTER VIII

General discussion of the conditions under which ambiguity is valuable and the means of apprehending it. Argument that theoretical understanding of it is needed now more than previ- ously. Not all ambiguities are relevant to criticism ; example from Jonson (p. 242). Discussion of how verbal analysis should be carried out and what it can hope to achieve.

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