The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  To cite a single example: “Strange Fits of Passion” represents a lover riding toward Lucy’s cottage, lulled by the steady beat of his horse’s hoofs, and with his eyes fixed on the evening moon.

  In one of those sweet dreams, I slept,

  Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!

  The sleep and dream here have a function very like that in “A Slumber”: they seal the lyric speaker’s mind so that he is oblivious to “human fears”—that is, to the human awareness that all of those whom we love are vulnerable to death. This state of mind turns out to be illusory, yielding a security which, in each of the two poems, is falsified in the concluding stanza. Yet the metaphorical sleep of the spirit is, paradoxically, described as “Kind Nature’s gentlest boon,” for without it we would live in an unending anxiety about the mortal vulnerability of those we love. In “Strange Fits,” as the narrator’s horse plods along, the sinking moon, marking the passage of time, suddenly drops behind the cottage roof.

  What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

  Into a Lover’s head!

  “O mercy!” to myself I cried,

  “If Lucy should be dead!”

  But the position of this poem as one of a group of poems about Lucy reveals that this premonition of her death was neither fond (that is, “foolish”) nor wayward, for it is validated by the grievous event. Similarly in “A Slumber” a girl, who to the lyric speaker’s bemused spirit had seemed invulnerable to time, turns out to have been more vulnerable than the poet himself.

  IV

  The weight of the evidence has tipped decidedly to the standard reading of “A Slumber” (in which “she” in the third line refers to a girl), yet leaves Davies’ reading (in which “she” refers to the poet’s spirit) as an open, though greatly diminished possibility. We have an important remaining resource: to entertain each reading in turn as an hypothesis, in order to determine which one best fits the semantic aspects of the poem in its entirety.

  At once we discover the phenomenon of the hermeneutic circle. The semantic aspects of the language of “A Slumber” are not hard data, which decisively accord with or reject either of the hypothetical interpretations. They are soft data, malleable enough to adapt themselves to each of the two hypotheses, however divergent. Different potential ranges of significance in each component of the poem come into play, and fall into a different configuration, as we alter our interpretive vantage. In the first stanza, for example, that a slumber seals the speaker’s spirit signifies, in the standard reading, that his spirit is lulled into forgetting its normal human fears that the one we love is fatally subject to time. In Davies’ reading, the same verbal expression re-forms itself to signify that the poet’s spirit, in its dreamlike trance, is oblivious to ordinary human anxieties, and is itself insensible to the passage of time. And so through the second stanza, we find adjustments in the meanings in each of the sequence of assertions, as we shift the reference of “she” from a girl to the speaker’s spirit.

  The situation of a reader who sets out to decide between the conflicting hypotheses, while difficult, is not desperate. The possible meanings of the phrasal elements of “A Slumber,” although adaptive to each hypothesis, are not so malleable but that some elements resist one or the other interpretation, and cry out against too drastic a manipulation of its semantic possibilities—not with a public outcry, but within the sensibility of a qualified reader of an English lyric poem. Let’s call such resistive elements “recalcitrancies”—verbal sequences which, to the semantic tact of a qualified reader, lie askew to, or go against the grain of, a particular interpretation.

  I find several recalcitrancies in Davies’ proposed reading. The pronoun “she” in the third line, given Wordsworth’s usage in other poems, is amenable to serving as a reference to the noun “spirit,” but manifests some unease in that function when “she” is repeated twice in the second stanza. And how plausible is it to claim that, even now, while he is in a trancelike state, the lyric speaker is able to describe that state of mind in such detail? Furthermore, what kind of sense does it make to assert that the tranced spirit has no motion or force of its own, but rolls round “with rocks and stones and trees”?

  Admittedly, Davies can make shift with these recalcitrancies. He proposes, for example, that in the trancelike state of the poet’s spirit, “the normal boundary between his own being and the rest of the world” disappears, so that he “imagines himself joined with the earth, and . . . identified with its diurnal motion.” This, I confess, does make sense. But it makes sense only by pulling at what the expert reader, by his internalized norms of linguistic practice, intuits as the normal range of semantic possibilities, in order to nudge what lies athwart Davies’ interpretation into alignment with it. There is, on the other hand, no recalcitrancy if we read the same words as referring to a girl who is in her grave, and so is entirely literally

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

  So throughout the poem, there are no recalcitrancies if we interpret “A Slumber” in the standard way. To be sure, the opening line—“A slumber did my spirit seal”—deviates markedly from colloquial English both in its word order and its high formality. But when we appraise the total poem, this deviation turns out to serve an important elegiac function—it is a ceremonial heightening of the style that imparts dignity, solemnity, and generality to the simple fact of the death of a single human being. From the first line to the last, “A Slumber” can be interpreted, without semantic strain, as an elegy about a girl who unexpectedly dies.

  V

  Taking into account all the evidence and counterevidence, which interpretation of Wordsworth’s poem are we justified in choosing?

  Here we are confronted by another difficulty. The reasons for or against each reading are diverse, uncodified, and lacking in sharp criteria by which to measure their evidential weight. Furthermore, the diverse reasons are not only immeasurable; they are incommensurable with each other. How are we to judge the weight of a reason based on normal English grammar, or on Wordsworth’s idiolect, against a reason based on more or less likely evidence that Wordsworth did, or did not, intend “A Slumber” to belong to a group of poems about Lucy; or both of these against an appeal to parallel passages in Wordsworth’s other poems; and all of these to semantic recalcitrancies, or lack of them, in one or another of the two interpretations?

  To put the matter in this way seems to make hopeless our attempt to achieve a valid interpretation of “A Slumber.” As a matter of common practice, however, we are usually able to come to a firm decision about the purport of a poem. My procedure in this essay has been artificial, enforced by my disagreement with Hugh Sykes Davies. We normally interpret a poem not by reasoning about it, but by applying to it our interpretive tact, which is the seemingly intuitive product of all our prior engagements with poems. It is only when this intuition is challenged by a drastically divergent possibility that we feel the need to separate out, as explicit arguments, factors that are simultaneous and implicit in our tactful decisions. And after having assimilated the results of all the arguments pro and con, my interpretive tact finds Wordsworth’s poem to be about a girl who unexpectedly dies.

  We can bring to bear an additional argument; which is, that in the standard reading “A Slumber” is a much better poem than in Davies’ reading. If the reasons I have cited were approximately in balance (though they are not), it would be reasonable—on the grounds that it would do the author the greater justice, and ourselves as readers a clear benefit—to choose the reading which yields the better poem. And I claim that, when read as an elegy, “A Slumber” has a much more effective dramatic structure, and achieves much greater emotional power, than when read as the exposition of a trance state of the speaker’s spirit.

  Davies’ reading minimizes the significance of the sudden shift from the past ten
se in stanza 1 to the present tense in stanza 2. What we have, in his view, is the continuing description of a trancelike state that began then and continues now. In the standard reading, on the other hand, we experience the shocking revelation that a girl, who then seemed so vital as to allay any sense of her vulnerability to time, is now dead—she has died, as Paul de Man once put it, in the space between the two stanzas. Davies’ reading also dissipates a powerful dramatic irony. Then, she had seemed “a thing” invulnerable to “earthly years”; now, the lyric speaker realizes that she has become a thing, rolled round, like rocks and stones and trees, in the revolution of the earth by which we measure earthly years. What we lose by Davies’ reading is an austere representation of the awful suddenness, unexpectedness, and finality of death, set in the grand perspective of the astronomical processes of the natural world. We lose, that is, a major lyric instance of what the literary critic Walter Raleigh decades ago described as “Wordsworth’s calm and almost terrible strength.”

  VI

  As the upshot of all these considerations, I am confirmed in my assurance that the traditional interpretation of “A Slumber” is correct. But I am confronted by a disconcerting discovery. Certain though I am that the traditional reading is right and Davies’ reading is wrong, I find that some of the graduate students in the seminar I described disagree with me; that my fellow director of the seminar, Max Black, disagrees with me; and that several of my literary friends also disagree with me.

  What to do when, myself so certain, I am confronted by a contrary judgment by indubitably qualified readers? My first and very human impulse is to get angry. But I resist the impulse, and run again through all the reasons for my interpretation that I have formulated. When I have done this, I can do no more; I have reached the point in giving reasons at which, as the philosopher Wittgenstein put it, “the spade turns.” If a qualified reader of lyric poems stubbornly holds to a contradictory reading, I can only wait, with what patience I can muster, for an infusion of grace—an interpretive conversion—that will get the reader to see what to me is so evident. But upon considering the matter, I realize that such a reader feels the same way about my stubbornness in maintaining my interpretation. So I have to admit that in this, and in similar instances of interpretive deadlock, some qualified readers’ certainty will be contradicted by the certainty of other qualified readers. And by this admission, I seem to have reasoned myself into sharing the skepticism I set out to disprove: that in interpreting poems, no reading can claim to be the right reading.

  At this juncture, I find illuminating observations by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which I venture to summarize in this way: Our uses of language are inter-involved with “forms of life”—activities which incorporate a diversity of language games that have been formed to accomplish a diversity of human purposes. Each language game operates according to a set of rules, some of which may overlap with the rules of other language games, while others are specific to its particular enterprise. In consequence of the differences in their rules, although a number of language games undertake to achieve certainty, Wittgenstein points out, “the kind of certainty is the kind of language-game.”2

  It is certain, for example, that “ten divided by five equals two.” It is also certain that Newton’s laws of motion are valid. Certainty in the language game of mathematics, however, and certainty in that of physical science depend on the application of rules specific to each. The two language games nonetheless have a common feature: both are highly specialized, designed systematically to exclude any role by individual human differences, in order to achieve universal agreement among all those who are competent players in each game.

  The language game in the enterprise we call literary criticism, on the other hand, is specifically organized to allow room for the play of individual human differences. Always readers bring to bear on the interpretation of a poem diverse sensibilities, ranges of experience, and individual temperaments. The consequence is that in some interpretive judgments, one’s certainty about an interpretation, however supported by valid reasons, will remain open to disagreement by other qualified readers. The interpretation of the basic reference of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber” falls into this category.

  It should be added that in this openness to disagreement consists the validity, as well as the vitality and enduring interest, of literary criticism. The inevitability of disagreement in this, as in many other humanistic pursuits, rests on a basic value: the rich diversity of individual human beings. The way of wisdom is to proceed rationally, to strive for a maximum consensus, and—when all possible evidence is adduced to no avail—to agree to disagree, in the recognition that some disagreements in basic humanistic enterprises are ultimately unresolvable.

  VII

  There remains another interpretive maneuver—one that is confidently to be expected in the climate of critical opinion inaugurated by William Empson’s greatly influential Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930. By “ambiguity” Empson signifies multiple meanings, and he proposes that in many instances in which critics contest the interpretation of a poetic passage, the either/or should be converted into a both-and. A few seminar students suggested that we ought to read “A Slumber” as referring both to a girl and to the poet’s spirit. The English critic A. P. Rossiter proposed in 1961 that in “A Slumber” the question “Which is right, A or B, is a non-question: the poem is ambivalent,” and “is only fully experienced when both opposites are held and included in a ‘two-eyed’ view.”3 And in 1984, twelve years after our joint seminar, Max Black published an essay in which he maintained that Wordsworth’s poem “must be regarded as an irreducible case of radical ambiguity,” in which both readings are equally valid.4

  I find a number of Empson’s examples of multiple meanings convincing, and have published essays in which I interpret some poetic passages as variously and simultaneously meaningful. For example, in the concluding scene of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra puts the asp to her breast, what she says is richly multiplex in meaning:

  Come, thou mortal wretch,

  With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

  Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,

  Be angry, and dispatch.

  The “mortal wretch,” the asp, is at once death-dealing and itself subject to death. “Wretch” and “fool” express both contempt and pity—she goes on to refer to the asp as “my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep.” The adjective “intrinsicate” may be read as blending “intrinsic” (the knot is inescapably part of life) and “intricate.” Also, two diverse meanings of “dispatch,” “make haste” and “kill,” are equally and simultaneously relevant. There is however, a necessary condition for this and other instances of multiple significance: the meanings, no matter how diverse, must be mutually compatible. And in Wordsworth’s “A Slumber,” the two contested meanings are drastically incompatible.

  On this issue it is useful to consider Wittgenstein’s famed example of the duck-rabbit.5 He presents a simple linear outline. You look at it and see a duck. You look again, and see a rabbit. You cannot, however, see the drawing simultaneously as both a duck and a rabbit.

  Similarly, in reading “A Slumber” I can read “she” in the third line, and in the statements that follow, as referring either to a girl or to the poet’s spirit, but I cannot read these pronouns as referring simultaneously both to a girl and to the poet’s spirit. The two interpretations can only be read as sequential alternatives; but to read it in this alternating fashion trivializes Wordsworth’s poem, converting it into a puzzle-poem, a complex linguistic trick in which you see first this, then that: now it’s a duck, now a rabbit; now it’s about a girl, now about the poet’s spirit. The only way to salvage Wordsworth’s great lyric is to read it as solely about a girl who unexpectedly dies. That is the correct interpretation. The alternative interpretation, that it is about the poet’s spirit, is a misread
ing, and should be rejected.

  VIII

  In closing his essay Hugh Sykes Davies remarks, disarmingly, that he does not “believe that the whole train of argument presented here in favour of the new interpretation is decisive. It does, however, seem enough . . . to deserve a run for its money.” But as the apostle Paul said, “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but only one receiveth the prize?” Davies has run a very good race; but mindful of Wittgenstein’s insight that the kind of certainty is the kind of language game, I assert without hesitation that his interpretation of “A Slumber” is certainly wrong.

  NOTES

  1. Hugh Sykes Davies, “Another New Poem by Wordsworth,” Essays in Criticism 15 (1965): 135–61.

  2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953), pp. 224–26.

  3. A. P. Rossiter, Angels with Horns (New York, 1961).

  4. Max Black, “The Radical Ambiguity of a Poem,” Synthèse 59 (April 1984): 89–107.

  5. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 194–99.

  “This Green Earth”: The Vision of Nature in the Romantic Poets

  I.

  “THIS GREEN EARTH.” Wordsworth used the phrase in his early poem “Tintern Abbey,” and repeated it no less than eight times in his other poems. I have appropriated it as an apt identifier for my topic today: the way that many major Romantic poets envisioned “nature,” in the basic denotation of the term—that is, everything on earth other than human beings and the results of human handiwork.