FourthDimension-9.html

How to Prove an Interpretation *

CLAIMS ABOUT THE meaning of a poem which, a few decades ago, would have been regarded as brittle paradoxes have become serious commonplaces in critical theories. These theories are diverse in their principles and procedures, but all issue in the claim that it is necessarily the case that a poem cannot have a determinate meaning, and that no reading of a poem can be a correct reading.

I remind you of the prevalence of this view by some quotations. Harold Bloom: “Every act of reading . . . makes of interpretation a necessary misprision . . . or misreading.” “There are no right readings.” Stanley Fish: “Any procedure that attempts to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail.” Jacques Derrida: “In any text, the inescapable absence of a transcendental signified extends the . . . play of signification to infinity.” Paul de Man: “We no longer take for granted that a literary text can be reduced to a finite meaning or set of meanings, but see the act of reading as an endless process in which truth and falsehood are inextricably intertwined.” And J. Hillis Miller denies that “any work has a fixed, identifiable meaning. . . . Any reading can be shown to be a misreading on evidence drawn from the text itself.”

It will surprise no one to hear that my position on this matter is the traditional one. I retain, that is, a stubborn predilection for finding out what a poem determinately means. I hold the view that, although the language of a poem may permit a considerable degree of interpretive freedom, we are usually able to achieve an interpretation that approximates the central or core meanings that the sentences of a poem were formed to convey. I believe also that we can adduce valid reasons which support such an interpretation against a proposed alternative. My critical interest, then, is in a correct reading rather than a misreading, or with a misreading as something to be detected and then discarded.

To support these claims, I shall examine a poem in order to isolate essential features of its meaning that have been disputed by competent readers, and then to identify the procedures for resolving the dispute which are available to traditional criticism. I choose this poem for several reasons: it is only eight lines long; it was introduced in a graduate seminar on philosophy and literature that the distinguished philosopher Max Black and I taught jointly at Cornell in 1972; and it has been subjected to diverse interpretations by a number of literary critics. The poem is a familiar one by William Wordsworth:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

E. D. Hirsch, in his influential book Validity in Interpretation (1967), raised the issue of interpretive disagreement by reprinting excerpts from two commentaries on the second stanza of Wordsworth’s poem. The first, by Cleanth Brooks, asserts that the “poet attempts to suggest something of the lover’s agonized shock at the loved one’s present lack of motion—of his response to her utter and horrible inertness.” The second commentary, by F. W. Bateson, instead finds a “pantheistic magnificence” in the last two lines, for the dead Lucy “has become involved in the sublime processes of nature.” This is a clear case of critical disagreement about an important feature of the poem, and it has often been discussed since Hirsch pointed it out. But notice that the divergence of these interpretations overlies an essential agreement. Brooks and Bateson disagree about the emotive state of mind, the attitudes and feelings, that the lyric speaker implies by his description of the situation in the second stanza. Both, however, agree that the speaker’s emotive state of mind is in response to the same state of affairs: a girl who was alive in stanza 1 is dead in stanza 2.

That was also the way that just about all the critics who commented on “A Slumber” read the poem until 1965, when Hugh Sykes Davies published an essay, “Another New Poem by Wordsworth.” This new poem is the old text of “A Slumber,” interpreted in a radically new way. The subject of the poem, Davies proposes, is not a girl at all; instead, the subject is the poet’s own spirit, identified in line 1—“A slumber did my spirit seal”—and the two stanzas describe a “trance-like state” of the poet’s spirit—a state in which, at the close of the poem, the poet feels himself to be, in spirit, joined with the earth, and “identified with its diurnal motion.”1

My initial response was that Davies proposes a blatant misreading of Wordsworth’s poem. But as I went on, I found that Davies goes on to present detailed reasons that tell against what, following Davies, I shall call “the standard reading” of the poem (that it is about a girl who dies), and other reasons that tell in favor of his “new reading” of the poem (that it is about a trancelike state of the poet’s own spirit). Davies argues modestly, and very well. Many of his reasons strike me as sound reasons, and force me to entertain seriously an interpretation I had rejected out of hand.

Let me say at once that Davies’ reasons strike me as sound reasons because, as traditional readers, he and I share a frame of reference—a tacit set of principles and procedures—that we automatically put into play in making sense of the text of “A Slumber.” We bring to the text, for example, the presumption that the two sentences constituting the poem are the written version of a parole, a poetic speech-act, composed by a particular author during a specific span of time. In this instance we have solid grounds for identifying the author as William Wordsworth, and the span of time at which the composition was undertaken and completed as 1798–99. We bring to our reading also the presumption that Wordsworth undertook to compose a text that would be determinately interpretable by qualified readers of English poetry. He did so by deploying his expertise in the practice of the English language—an ongoing practice which he had inherited, and had learned to employ from early infancy—as well as his expertise in the linguistic conventions specific to lyric poems. We also presuppose that we, as qualified readers, will be able to understand Wordsworth’s text, by deploying our expertise in the practice of interpreting the English language—a continuing practice that we, like Wordsworth, have inherited, and that we share with him; except for slight changes, over the course of two intervening centuries, which are identifiable, and so can be taken into account.

It is only because Davies and I share this frame of linguistic reference that our arguments for or against a disputed feature of the meaning of Wordsworth’s poem can engage with each other on the same plane of discourse. Our tacit participation in a common interpretive practice enables each of us to give reasons for an interpretation of “A Slumber” that the other will account as sound and relevant reasons; even though neither of us may, at the end, find his opponent’s reasons adequate to force him to change his interpretive decision.

To turn back to the issue between us: Davies claims that Wordsworth’s poem is about a trancelike condition of the poet’s spirit. I claim that it is about a girl who unexpectedly dies. The reasons that Davies gives for his interpretation, and the counterreasons I give for mine, I believe, pretty much exhaust the inventory of the kinds of evidence available in the attempt to resolve a radically disputed interpretation of a poem.

In this dispute all turns, as Davies rightly says, “on the antecedent of the pronoun ‘she’ in the third line.” Who, or what, is “she”? In the standard reading, “she” refers to a girl; in Davies’ reading, “she” refers back to the noun in line 1—the word “spirit.”

The reference of “she” depends on the grammar of the English language. In my school days, teachers of English composition cited what they called a “rule” of grammar, not to use a pronoun, embedded in an utterance, except to refer to the nearest antecedent noun that agrees in number with the pronoun; and according to this rule, “she” can only refer to the noun “spirit.” But such prescriptive grammatical rules are merely rules of thumb, useful as a shortcut to guiding novices to write clearly and avoid ambiguity. The validity of such rules is based on the trained intuitions—the linguistic tact—of competent users of a language; that is, on their sense of what is grammatically normal, and also what is grammatically possible. This linguistic tact is the product of our mastery, over time, of the regularities of usage in the practice of the language we have inherited.

In the seminar I have mentioned, the graduate students were asked to specify the reference of “she” in an unidentified text of “A Slumber.” Of the seventeen respondents, eleven identified the referent as a girl or young woman, while six identified it as the antecedent word “spirit.” That so large a minority chose the latter alternative, I admit, surprised me. I now think that Max Black and I made a mistake in specifically asking the question; the results were probably biased, because to ask canny students these days “What is the reference of ‘she’?” alerts them to seek other possibilities than the one that seems obvious—it is to force a card. However that may be, I must grant that Davies has scored a sound point: if we take “A Slumber” in isolation, a possible initial expectation is that “she” refers to “spirit”; its reference to a girl not hitherto mentioned, while permitted by our grammatical tact—especially in the conventionally abrupt onset of a short lyric poem—is a slight surprise.

But to read “she” as referring to “spirit” runs counter to another intuition in our practice of the language. In English, when a noun such as “spirit” signifies something that is not clearly masculine or feminine, our expectation is that a pronoun referring to it will be not the feminine “she,” but the neuter “it.” If Wordsworth, then, intended to refer to “spirit,” why didn’t he put the reference beyond question by writing, “It seemed a thing . . .”?

To meet this objection, Davies appeals from what we intuit as a regularity in the general practice of a language, to an idiolect—the special practice of a particular speaker. He demonstrates that in his other poems Wordsworth, when referring to “spirit” in the sense of a human faculty, sometimes used a neuter, but at other times a feminine pronoun. While we find in some of Wordsworth’s poems clear instances of the neuter pronoun (for example, “and now her Spirit longed / For its last flight to heaven’s security”), we find in other poems clear instances of the feminine pronoun (for example, “and there his spirit shaped / Her prospects . . .”).

Where does the twofold appeal to our linguistic tact—our trained intuition of the norms, or impulsions, of English grammar—leave us? Since each tends in a different direction, I would say that it leaves us balanced between the standard and new reading of “A Slumber.” We need to seek further evidence before deciding between them.

Davies turns next to evidence for an author’s intention. The question here becomes: Did Wordsworth intend the pronoun “she” in the third line to refer to the lyric speaker’s spirit, or to a girl?

It is clear from what Hugh Sykes Davies says that he shares my view—it is the traditional view—that a successful utterance is the verbal realization of the speaker’s intention to mean something, and that for a hearer or reader to grasp that intention is to understand the utterance correctly. But so long as we limit ourselves to the printed text of “A Slumber,” an appeal to Wordsworth’s intention will get us nowhere in deciding between our disputed interpretations. Wordsworth’s intended meaning is available to us only insofar as it is successfully realized in the text. To appeal, therefore, to Wordsworth’s intention in the text of “A Slumber” in order to resolve an equivocality in that text is to reason in a circle, for it appeals to an intention whose equivocality in the problem we seek to resolve.

Let us, then, look for evidence of Wordsworth’s intention outside the text of “A Slumber.” By “intention” I don’t mean a distinctive conscious state which preceded the poet’s writing of the opening lines of “A Slumber,” for the poet’s intended meaning gets realized only in the process of verbalizing the sentences that constitute the poem. By direct, external evidence of Wordsworth’s intended meaning I signify simply what Wordsworth would have said, after composing the poem, in answer to a question about the intended reference of the pronoun “she.”

Suppose we were to find a letter written in 1799 by Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet, S. T. Coleridge, in which he reports asking Wordsworth, “William, in the third line of ‘A Slumber,’ what did you intend the pronoun ‘she’ to refer to?” and that Wordsworth had answered, “I meant a girl, of course.” Since that response comports with the phrasing of the text of “A Slumber,” that would settle the matter. If on the other hand Wordsworth had said, “I meant by ‘she’ my own spirit,” that would also settle the matter. In response to this latter possibility, however, Coleridge might well have said: “Well, yes; but you were careless in your phrasing, because I, like most others who read your poem, take ‘she’ to refer to a girl.” (We know that is the way Coleridge interpreted the pronoun, because in a letter written in 1799, after receiving a manuscript copy of “A Slumber,” he described it as “a most sublime epitaph.”)

Hugh Sykes Davies in his essay asserts, as I have, that if we had a direct and credible statement from Wordsworth that he intended “she” to refer to a girl, “that would be an end of the matter”; but he points out that we have no such direct statement from Wordsworth. We do, however, possess indirect evidence, outside the text of “A Slumber,” of Wordsworth’s authorial intention, and that is the seeming fact that Wordsworth wrote “A Slumber” as one in a group of five poems, in which the other four poems refer indubitably to the death—actual or anticipated—of a girl, who in each of these poems is named “Lucy.” If so, this would constitute evidence that Wordsworth intended “A Slumber” to be one of five lyric meditations on the unexpected death of a girl.

Davies argues strenuously against the grounds of the assumption that Wordsworth intended “A Slumber” to be a Lucy poem. We can see why he needs to do so. In Wordsworth’s first publication of “A Slumber” in Lyrical Ballads of 1800, and in the subsequent editions of 1802 and 1805, “A Slumber” is preceded by two poems explicitly about the death of Lucy, of which the second is “She Dwelt among th’ Untrodden Ways.” The readers of these volumes thus found the following sequence from the last stanza of “She Dwelt” to the first stanza of “A Slumber.” There is no title to break this sequence; only a printer’s ruled line:

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

If we read this as Wordsworth’s deliberately planned sequence, there seems little room for doubt that the “she” in “A Slumber” was intended to be synonymous in reference with the “she” in the preceding stanza, and that this she “is in her grave.”

Davies’ arguments against identifying “A Slumber” as a poem about Lucy is threefold: (1) It alone in the group of five doesn’t include the name of “Lucy,” nor even mention a girl. (2) Wordsworth never printed more than three of the so-called Lucy poems together; the standard conjunction of all five is the work of nineteenth-century editors and anthologists of Wordsworth’s poetry. (3) In his edition of his Poems in 1815, fifteen years after the initial publication of “A Slumber,” Wordsworth took the poem out of its earlier conjunction with two Lucy poems, and instead placed it after a different Lucy poem, “Three Years She Grew,” in a section of his volume that he classified as “Poems of the Imagination.” From these indubitable facts, Davies proposes the conclusion that Wordsworth had never intended “A Slumber” to be a poem about Lucy, nor an elegy. He printed it next to one or more of the Lucy poems only because of the incidental circumstance that all these poems had been written in 1799, while Wordsworth was living in Germany.

These arguments seem a case of special pleading. This aspect comes clear if we restate the same facts with a contrary emphasis: Wordsworth always published “A Slumber” in combination with at least one poem explicitly about the fact or premonition of Lucy dying, and he always placed it immediately after the Lucy poem or poems. Thus, even in the altered position in the volume of 1815, we get the following sequence of the closing stanza of “Three Years She Grew” and the opening stanza of “A Slumber”:

Thus Nature spake—The work was done—

How soon my Lucy’s race was run!

She died, and left to me

This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;

The memory of what has been,

And never more will be.

A slumber did my spirit seal. . . .

It is to a high degree unlikely that Wordsworth, with his care about the order in which to print his poems, would in every instance place a poem, intended to be about a trancelike state of his spirit, in a position where the grammatical reach of “she” is so patently back to “Lucy” in the preceding stanza.

Where do we stand now? I think it fair to say that the indirect evidence of Wordsworth’s intention, like the evidence of grammatical norms in the first stanza, still leaves the possibility open—but much less open—that the poem is about the poet’s spirit. Where do we turn for further evidence?

III

Davies’ next move is to adduce a number of passages from Wordsworth’s other poems which represent a trancelike state of the poet’s spirit, with the claim that they closely parallel “A Slumber,” in that they describe that state in terms that are identical, or closely related to, central terms in “A Slumber.”

I agree that if Davies’ parallel passages are close, and close in the most telling ways to “A Slumber,” they strengthen the case for his reading of the poem, on the ground that, if Wordsworth habitually uses certain terms to describe trance states, the presence of those terms in “A Slumber” enhance the likelihood that this poem is also about a trance state. The trouble, however, is that each of Davies’ parallel passages does not coincide with, but instead lies askew to, the meaning he ascribes to “A Slumber,” in a way that casts substantial doubt on its pertinence for establishing the meaning of Wordsworth’s poem.

I present as examples three of Davies’ passages which are the strongest of his proposed parallels. The first two are from Wordsworth’s The Prelude of 1805, in the sequence that Davies gives them:

Wonder not

If such my transports were; for in all things

I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.

One song they sang, and it was audible,

Most audible then when the fleshly ear,

O’ercome by grosser prelude of that strain,

Forgot its functions, and slept undisturb’d.

* * *

Oft in those moments such a holy calm

Did overspread my soul, that I forgot

That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw

Appear’d like something in myself, a dream,

A prospect in my mind.

We can, I think, agree that both these passages are about a trancelike state, and that some words or phrases Wordsworth uses to describe that state are synonymous with, or related to, words and phrases in “A Slumber.” Related to “slumber,” for example, are “slept” in the first passage, and “a dream” in the second. We can parallel “she neither hears” in “A Slumber” with the “fleshly ear” that forgets its functions in the first passage; we can also parallel “nor sees” in “A Slumber” with the poet’s forgetting that he had “bodily eyes” in the second. But notice this fact: in “A Slumber” these terms are used in a way precisely contrary to their use in the alleged parallels. According to Davies’ reading of “A Slumber,” it is the spirit that falls asleep—“A slumber did my spirit seal”—so that it neither hears nor sees. In the first passage, however, it is not the spirit, but what in the context is opposed to spirit—a physical sense, “the fleshly ear”—that sleeps. In the second passage, it is another physical sense, the “bodily eyes,” that cease their ordinary function; and in both passages it is clearly implied that these lapses of normal functions in the bodily senses, instead of putting the spirit to sleep, are the conditions necessary to enable the spirit (or “soul”) to come awake and function most fully. As Wordsworth put it succinctly in the poem “Tintern Abbey,” in a passage Davies also cites as a parallel; in the trancelike state “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul.”

Take another of Davies’ asserted parallels, cited from a draft that Wordsworth originally intended to include in The Prelude. The poet and a companion, on an evening walk, come suddenly upon a horse which “stood / Insensible and still.”

. . . breath, motion gone,

Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone,

Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk

That had no stir of breath; we paused awhile

In pleasure of the sight, and left him there

With all his functions silently sealed up,

Like an amphibious work of Nature’s hand,

A borderer dwelling betwixt life and death,

A living Statue or a statued Life.

This marvelous passage, as Davies says, includes some equivalents to elements in “A Slumber”: the total lack of motion, the functions that are “sealed up,” the seeming imperviousness to time. There is, however, a serious difficulty with this parallel: these phrases don’t describe a condition of the poet’s spirit; they describe a horse. Of this fact Davies is naturally aware, but he nonetheless insists on the parallel by claiming that the “slumbering horse . . . can very reasonably be taken as . . . an ‘objective correlative,’ as an outward image for the inward experience” of the observer’s slumber, or trancelike state. But the passage has no indication that the description of the horse is intended as a projected correlative of the observer’s state of mind. In fact, the lines include an explicit description of the observer’s state, and this is not in the least trancelike, but one of simple and passing pleasure at a visual perception: “we paused awhile / In pleasure of the sight.”

This brings me to an objection to Davies’ procedure throughout this part of his argument. To argue by parallels justly, one must not bias the selection, but adduce instances that are closest to the problematic poem in all relevant aspects; that is, not only in verbal similarities, but also in such features as literary genre, verse form, and length. Most of Davies’ parallels, and all of the most telling ones, are descriptions of a trancelike state excerpted from Wordsworth’s epic-length autobiographical poem, written in blank verse, The Prelude, or from the long blank-verse meditative poem “Tintern Abbey.” The fact is, however, that with respect to the most salient features of “A Slumber,” we can cite much closer parallels than those of Davies.

For example, “A Slumber” is a lyric poem, it is short, and it is written in ballad stanzas with alternating four- and three-foot iambic lines that rhyme a-b-a-b. In these generic and formal features, the near parallels are not blank-verse excerpts from The Prelude, but lyric poems by Wordsworth, and above all the four poems about the death of Lucy. Of these, three are short lyrics (from three to seven stanzas) and are written in the same ballad stanza as “A Slumber”—four- and three-foot iambic lines, rhyming a-b-a-b. To strengthen the case, various of the lyrics about Lucy include close verbal, imagistic, and semantic parallels to “A Slumber,” if that poem is interpreted as an elegy—much closer parallels than any of those pointed to by Davies, if “A Slumber” is read as referring to the poet’s entranced spirit.

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.

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.

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 tense 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.”

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 misreading, 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.