The other week I read William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (first published 1930, third edition 1953 with new footnotes by the author). Empson purports to taxonomize all sorts of “ambiguity,” defined as any technique or nuance “which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.” Really I’m not sure I fully grasped his taxonomy. (One might call it a taxonomy of ambiguity in more ways than one!) But it’s something like this:

1. “A detail is effective in several ways at once.” For example, Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs” is effective not just because choirs are places in which to sing but because they involve sitting in rows, because they are made of wood, “because the cold and Narcissistic charm of choir-boys suits well Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets,” and so on.

2. “Two or more meanings are fully resolved into one.” Shakespeare’s 81st sonnet is like one of those poems that says something different when you read from bottom up, or read only every other line: in Sonnet 81 each line could pertain to the one after or the one before. Is it “Tongues to be your being shall rehearse / When all the breathers of this world are dead,” or “When all the breathers of this world are dead / You still shall live”?

3. “Two apparently unconnected meanings are given simultaneously.” For example, Dryden often “seems to claim only to be saying one thing, even when one does not know which of two things he is saying.” “The welkin pitched with sullen clouds around” — are the clouds pitched in a circle around the edges of the sky, as the tents of the enemy? or do the clouds blacken the sky? “The praisèd peacock is not half so proud” — is this “the peacock, which is commonly praised,” or “the peacock when it has just been praised”? Thomas Hood’s “Death in the Kitchen” is quoted for its puns and not-quite-puns.

4. “Alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.” For example, Shakespeare’s 83rd sonnet: “One must pause before shadowing with irony this noble compound of eulogy and apology. But…” Empson does.

5. “Fortunate confusion”: The author discovers his idea as he goes. For example, Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark”: “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 …” What is “that silver sphere”? Surely the unseen star. But in the next stanza, by association, the poet has decided the bird is like the moon, which “rains out her beams” from behind a cloud. Empson: “Mr. Eliot complained [in The Dial of March 1928] that Shelley had mixed up two of these periods [even, broad daylight, dawn, and night]; it seems less of an accident when you notice that he names all four.” A. E. Housman, December 1928: “The silver sphere is the Morning Star … The moon, when her intense lamp narrows in the white dawn clear, is not a sphere but a sickle: when she is a sphere at sunrise she is near the western horizon, visible in broad daylight and disappearing only when she sets; so that nothing could be less like the vanishing of the skylark.” And yet Shelley certainly does compare the skylark to the moon, also.

6. Irrelevancy: the reader must invent interpretations. Yeats’ “Fergus and the Druid” tells how King Fergus renounced his active life — “A wild and foolish labourer is a king — to do, and do, and do, and never dream … I would be no more a king, but learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours” — yet, upon gaining his desire, “now I have grown nothing, being all, / And the whole world weighs down upon my heart.” Empson considers Yeats’ followup poem: “Who will go drive with Fergus now / And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade?” Is this poem set before Fergus’ transformation, making it a call for volunteers (“There is still time to drive with Fergus, as he is still a king in the world”)? Or is this poem set after, making it an ubi sunt? When it is said, irrelevantly, that Fergus now “rules the shadows of the wood, and the dishevelled wandering stars,” is this meant to be comforting (rules even) or disquieting (rules only)?

7. “Full contradiction.” Pope’s “A mighty maze, but not without a plan” gives occasion to point out that “a maze is conceived as something that at once has and has not got a plan.” Many “muddles with negatives” such as Spenser’s “But stings and sharpest steele did far exceed / The sharpnesse of his cruell rending clawes,” and Shakespeare’s “No, nor a man that fears you less than he: that’s lesser than a little.”

A small collection of quotable quotes from Seven Types of Ambiguity:

Page 7:

There is much danger of triviality in this, because it requires a display of ingenuity such as can easily be used to escape from the consciousness of one’s ignorance […]

Page 25:

All languages are composed of dead metaphors, as the soil of corpses; but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, color it with an implied comparison. 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.

Page 106:

[As to puns, Marvell] manages to feel Elizabethan about them, to imply that it was quite easy to produce puns and one need not worry about one’s dignity in the matter. It became harder as the language was tidied up, and one’s dignity was more seriously engaged. For the Elizabethans were quite prepared, for instance, to make a pun by a mispronunciation, would treat puns as mere casual bricks, requiring no great refinement, of which any number could easily be collected for a flirtation or an 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.

Page 158:

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.

Page 165:

Later English poetry [such as Swinburne] 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 direction of thought, or connection of ideas, by a transition from one sleeping metaphor to another. Later nineteenth-century poetry carried this delicacy to such a degree that it can reasonably be called decadent, because its effects depended on a tradition that its example was destroying.