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PARTISAN REVIEW
of modern physics, is a time-space event. It is not too much to say
that for the poet no word in a language is ever used twice exactly
in the same way. William Empson has written a stimulating book
on the subject entitled
Seven Types of Ambiguity.
An ambiguity,
according to Empson, is "any consequence of language, however
slight, which adds some nuance to the direct statement of prose".
Of course it is an implied joke that the possible "consequences"
cannot be reduced to the mystic number seven; and
I.
A. Richards,
in
The Philosophy of Rhetoric,
demonstrates even to himself the
bankruptcy of the attempt to submit imaginative expression to the
quantitative method. Poetry refuses to become a branch of
behaviorist psychology. And Richards is finally brought to agree–
ment with Coleridge that language is "everywhere at its goal": you
cannot separate the leaves from the tree without doing violence to
the whole. (Joyce uses the identical image to indicate the organic
relationship between his subject and his style.) But it may be
worth-while to look at an instance of this determination of the full
meaning of a word by its place in the context in the poetry of the
past:
Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in my ears,
That long time have been barren.
This is from Act II, Scene V, of
Antony
and
Cleopatra,
and is
addressed by Cleopatra to the messenger from Antony. Everything
in the scene up to this point has served to bring out the mood of
febrile desperation to which Cleopatra has been reduced as a result
of Antony's long absence. Yet the eighteenth-century commentator
Dyce could not believe that Shakespeare would have had Cleo·
patra use such a word as "ram"; he proposes "rain" as a more
sensible reading. Although he was quite right in believing that
there should be some connection between the main verb and the
image of "fruitfulness", he was too "sensible" to appreciate the
Shakespearian fondness for ambiguity. For it is of course no acci–
dent that of all the possible verbs in English denoting "press"
Cleopatra should have hit upon the one that is derived from the
name of the animal which is the sacred symbol of fertility. As a
matter of fact, it is possible to go further and relate the association
to the play as a whole, in which Antony is continually being
referred to as a god and Cleopatra compared to the earth-goddess
