Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Ambiguity and the Poets
take the sentence at face value or not? And what about that adjective
“dirty.” Does it signify merely “unkempt” in the usual way of hermits
or is this an attribute of his mind? The lexical ambiguity here extends
to character and genre.
In another example, ambiguity exists only temporarily, for a single
line. Here is Milton, in the opening lines of Paradise Lost. They read:
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe […] (I.1-3)
And so on, in Milton’s masterly style, with its distinctive commanding
rhythm, latinate syntax and much more. We are so familiar with these
lines that we must stretch our minds and imagine a first-time reader
in order to hear the brief ambiguity in the last word of line 1, “Fruit.”
This first-time reader might well assume that the word carries its
abstract meaning of “result,” so that we expect something like: ‘Of
Man’s first Disobedience, and the Fruit/ Thereof that led to loss of
Eden.’ But no. Instead, Milton breaks our expectations with the linebreak—and
for all poets, and especially for Milton, words at the start
and finish of the line are worth attention. He moves to the literal
meaning of “Fruit” as in the creation narrative in Genesis, the fruit
from the Tree of Knowledge. This lexical example is an ambiguity of
scale, so to speak: one piece of fruit as against enormous results. Milton
has thereby highlighted the implicit significance of the small
decisions we make, how they may lead to much larger consequences.
Of course, the unobtrusive preposition offers a rich field for ambiguity.
“If as a poet,” writes Christopher Ricks, “you seek the simplest
and most permanent forms of language, you are bound to give special
importance to prepositions and conjunctions—those humble fundamentals,
in, up […] of, and so on. If as a poet you are concerned above
all with relations and relationships, you are bound to give special
importance to those words which express relationships: prepositions
and conjunctions” (120). And not only poets. At lunch one day at
Victoria College, Northrop Frye told us that he had lain awake the
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