Tags
Criticism, English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literature, Poetry, Romantic Poets, The Sick Rose, William Blake
William Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ provides a significant introduction to literary theory for the new critical reader. Empson’s interpretations of ambiguity in poetic language revolve around a central point; that ambiguity as Empson defines it ‘is any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language’ . This definition may appear worryingly vague, but the prerequisite for maintaining contextual relevance to the text guards against undisciplined or meretricious readings. Within these abstract constraints exists a transcendentally dimensional poetical ‘space’, yielding more room to encounter Empson’s ‘alternative reactions’ than might appear upon first reading. How this close reading approach helps the reader to understand ambiguity as a positive literary influence can be demonstrated by analysing William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’.
The title introduces both the central metaphorical figure, and the first ambiguity: what is the nature of the Rose and that which ails it? This poetic impression of natural beauty withered by canker may describe a woman afflicted by disease or ravaged by love, or it may refer to the symbolic Rose of England now blighted by industrialisation. Through syntactic ambiguity, the poem may look back to a miracle, when the sick rose up, cured. What is certain, besides the need for this latter example to validate contextual relevance through the wider text, is that different interpretations produce different emotive responses, which remain with the reader as memorial artefacts and contextual markers.
In the opening line, through direct narrative address and punctuation, the Rose becomes isolated:
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
The ambiguous meaning of ‘flies’ creates enduring uncertainty until the reason for the Rose’s separation is contextualised. Michael Riffaterre observes that ‘as a word, worm is meaningful only in the context of flower’ , and vice versa. While this may help the reader recognise a traditional link between a worm and a flower, it does little to help establish the same relation between the worm and the poetic Rose.
To establish such a connection requires the reader to invent and assign new meaning for ambiguous poetic language. The Byronic description of the worm is not readily associated with Riffaterre’s contextual version, the devourer of fruit, so the reader may wish to refer to memorial artefacts and contextual markers. The Rose, may now embody a female form beset by atmospheric sexual imagery; an unseen nocturnal presence borne on swift, silent wings; or describe symbolically, Blake’s once ‘green and pleasant land’ eclipsed by a howling, belching, mechanised parasite. Consequently, new poetic interpretations of literary ambiguity should be judged on merit where due diligence is paid to establishing clear contextual relevance. By Empson’s example, the new critical reader learns to question poetical meaning with increasing capability; by practicing that example, the reader learns to question even the narrative voice which proclaimed the Rose sick.
Blake, William, ‘The Sick Rose’ in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Richard Willmott, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Blake, William, ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ in The Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, (London: University of California Press, 1981).
Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949).
Riffaterre, Michael, ‘The Self-sufficient Text’, Diacritics, 3. 3 (1973).
The Space Between the Ears 