Poetry

Guy Cook, in ‘The Discourse of Advertising’ (Routledge, 1996) gives several examples.

Ambiguity can be in the semantics of a word, or in the syntax, or in deviance from an expected form,

which brings to mind the form deviated from, as well as itself:

“A Hopkins sonnet, for example, begins with the line:

I wake and feel the fell of night not day

The odd and ambiguous choice of ‘fell’ evokes more ‘usual’ variations on the phrase structure

(NP (PP (NP )))

the x of night

such as ‘the black of night’ or ‘the dead of night’,

thus attracting their meanings to itself. But ‘fell’ also means ‘a blow’, ‘an animal pelt’, ‘a moor’ and ‘cruel’.

Phonologically it parallels the verb ‘feel’. The Hopkins line is deviant in two senses:

it departs from set patterns, and it tolerates ambiguity.

The following poem by Malcolm Williams illustrates a different kind of deviation.

Here the departures from expectation are syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic.

Pipe Song

Plant, Spirit,

In me your power.

I suck burning

From the bowl of a pipe,

And blow clouds of smoke

From my mouth,

And see with the eye of

Leaf Buds, grass shoots.

I enter your world.

Enter mine.

In any poem, each line is both an autonomous unit,

and also part of a longer grammatical unit which may continue into the next line.

Each line is thus complete and incomplete simultaneously,

and this often creates conflicting interpretations.

In the opening line of this poem,

‘Plant’ and ‘Spirit’ can each be read as noun or verb,

depending on how one reads on into the next line. There are four possible readings, equivalent to

1 Voc NP Imperative VP PP

(Oh Plant) (spirit) (in me)

2 Imperative VP Voc NP PP

(Plant) (Oh Spirit) (in me)

3 Voc NP Voc NP PP VP NP

(Oh Plant) (Oh Spirit) (in me) (is) (your power) with ‘is’ ellipted

4 Voc NP Imperative VP Imperative VP A/PP Od/NP

(Oh you) (<Plant and Spirit>) (in me) (your power) with ‘Oh you’ and ‘and’ ellipted.”

In both cases, the effect of the ambiguity is both to deepen the meaning,

but also to arouse interest, and make the work more memorable.