Epilogue to Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, and Preludes by T.S. Eliot

Seven Types of Ambiguity seems like a fascinating book that'd be interesting to read in its entirety someday. For this project, however, I'm just reading the essays selected in The Critical Tradition, and for that only this epilogue is included.

Essentially, points in a text when the meaning isn't completely unambiguous are open to interpretation by the reader, and can produce a variety of meanings. Empson appears to further assert that every statement contains ambiguity (and therefore interperability) of some type or another—even so far as to validate misreading as a locus for useful interpretation. Yet there is a tension always between ambiguity, and the "forces" which hold ideas together. 

Though he holds ambiguity to be beautiful, he also wonders if those forces are presently (in 1930) too weak, and that "the English language 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." 

He uses the example of the newspaper headline: "ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER," and points out how unwieldy it would be to parse those words outside that context. Is the assassin Italian, or is the disaster Italian?  Is 'Plot' a noun or a verb? Is 'bomb' a noun, verb, or adjective?

He also touches on how often art requires biography in order to be understood in the way the artist might have predicted a person would understand it. "Those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers," and yet the art can be read and appreciated without that. Perhaps the reader will miss much of what is there, yet perhaps also they will find something that could not be there if they knew more about where the poem came from. 

Empson describes a sort of "noble to naughty" scale of how people appreciate art, in which certain ways of appreciating a thing are "high minded," and other ways of appreciating the same thing are "low minded," yet also for a thing to have a chance at expressing itself in a high minded way it must have something of a low minded charm to it. 

To examine art we must be open to be affected by it. Dispassionate analysis is a dead thing. Unless one is enjoying poetry, one cannot create it, as poetry, in their mind. 

 That was all a bit disorganized, but it has been a disorganized week, and there's a great deal to think about in this essay. Short of reading it all over again and clarifying my notes (not conducive to keeping a good momentum through the material), I'll leave it as a bit of a disorganized mess. 

— 

Now to the poem, another by T.S. Eliot. And speaking of ambiguity, boy howdy, I've been reading through all of these thinking they were part of an intentional Prufrock series. I thought this because this section of my book is titled Prufrock and Other Observations, and the first two poems are so clearly entwined with one another in their themes of sexually frustrated, emasculated young men being awkward around women. Yet apparently that's simply the name of Eliot's first published collection, and the book I've got reproduces that collection. There is not, necessarily, any connection between the poems save that they have the same author. 

That's certainly colored my reading of Conversation Galante, Aunt Helen, and even Preludes.  

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

One of the things that delights me most in poetry is when the title feels like an essential line of the poem. A thing which creates context using the power of giving a name to a thing, and in so doing changes everything about how the rest of the poem is read. Immediately we know these are 4 preludes, and it's easy to see that we never describe the beginning, or the substance of a thing. We don't describe life being lived, we just share these moments of 'before.' Before the evening's rest, before the day's work, before getting out of bed.

I am interested in the pronouns throughout the poem. The bulk of the poem is addressed to "you." The line "You curled the papers from your hair" makes me think that the "you" being addressed is a woman. (Echoes of my assumption that this was a Prufrock poem) I know women often use paper in their hair as part of styling it, and I know protecting long hair during sleep is often an involved process. I can't recall the two things being done together, but I'm not enough of an Eliot biographer to know how women would have cared for their hair in his time and place. Perhaps "papers" are what we would now call curlers? 

Only in 4 does the pronoun change to "His," then finally to "I." Two people distinct from the one addressed in prelude 1, 2, and 3. 

And on that note of ambiguity created by distance from the author, I'm curious about the "smell of steaks in passageways" right at the start. Steaks seem, to me, to imply either a celebration or affluence, yet everything else tells me this is a workaday meal for the end of a working class day, so I wonder how that word is being used. 

I'm also struck by the two occurrences of "vacant lots" in the poem. In Prelude 1 it's where the newspapers come from, before the gusty shower wraps them around your feet. So to is the vacant lot where ancient women revolve as they gather fuel. Presumably these poor women scavenge for newspaper to warm their homes. 

What I saw in this poem was a look at the quiet interludes in daily life. The beats of transition. Yet, from reading the analyses of others, I can see that Eliot is talking specifically about life *in a city* here. Something that would have been becoming increasingly normal during his day. And he doesn't seem to like cities very much at all, focusing on their grime, how cramped they are, how they block out the sky. How they are a place where life moves from beer, to coffee, and back again.