Metaphorically resolved ambiguity

'The heart... being shore to the ocean':

A useful point of departure for our further examination of poetic ambiguity would be Robert Penn Warren's comment quoted a couple of weeks ago. "Most writers are trying to find out what they think or feel...not simply working from the given, but towards the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, 'What do I really feel about this?'" The fact is, however, that individual poets including Penn Warren alternate between these two poles of poetic perspective. They write either as 'resolved souls', to borrow a phrase from Marvell, or as unresolved souls. And poetic ambiguity is most easily understandable when differentiated between these two heads. Let's consider that of the 'resolved soul' first. Here is Frost's shortest poem, 'Devotion', - MI Kuruvilla's favourite:

"The heart can think of no devotion Greater than being shore to the ocean - Holding the curve of one position, Counting an endless repetition." This seems to be a beautifully simple expression of selfless love. The devoted heart is compared to the shore that submits to the ocean; submissiveness being suggested by the concave "curve" with which the shore receives the waves breaking convexly upon it. "Holding" that curve indicates the resolution of the shore in maintaining this supportive position. It is "one" position, the devotion of the shore is unchanging - in fact unambiguous!

Demonstrative devotion

When we come to the last line, the attention seems to shift to the ocean. Its, after all, are the waves that keep breaking "endlessly" upon the shore.

Thus the sea seems demonstrative of a devotion comparable to that of the shore, albeit it of a more active and dominant kind. The implication of man and wife devoted to each other in their mutually complementary roles is unmistakable. But this is where the ambiguity begins!

The subject of this passage is "the heart", and it is to the shore that the heart is compared. Thus the word "counting" is actually in apposition to either the heart or the shore, not to the ocean which is only the object of the passage. Therefore "counting" necessarily evokes the idea of the heart beating unceasingly and, since the heart is likened to the shore, it is the latter rather than the sea that is doing the counting. So this is a further aspect of the seashore's devotion, the fact that it counts the waves as they repeatedly and endlessly break. Considering that the literal human heart beats some three billion times in a lifetime of seventy to eighty years, the magnitude of the devotion of which the figurative heart is capable may well be imagined!

And remember, it is the wife that the shore represents in the marital relationship, not the man. So this poem seem to be primarily about womanly devotion. And here we cannot but recall the words of Anne Eliot in Jane Austen's 'Persuasion'. Comparing a woman's love to a man's, she tells Captain Harville: "O Your feelings may be the strongest,...but the same spirit of analogy will allow me to assert that ours are the most tender.

Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which explains exactly my view of the nature of their attachments."

What Anne is saying directly, and the poem implying indirectly, is that the woman's capacity for devotion is actually superior to that of the man. For, in reflection of the longer-living capacity of women, it is the more enduring.

Passively supportive

But the poem has not finished with its exploration of devotion! If the "counting" shore is like the beating heart, it can hardly be merely passively supportive. Its submissiveness to the ocean is dynamic, for if there were no shore there would no breaking of the waves. In fact, it is the shore that defines the ocean by keeping its waves in check. Thus the shore's devotion has a controlling power which the ocean cannot do without. By implied extension, it is the tender devotion of the woman that provides the male not only with the object of his love but with the incentive for loyalty towards it. This ensures that his more robust capacity for love is not misused and corrupted by an indiscriminate "expense of spirit in a waste of shame". In other words, the devotion of the shore or the woman inspires a similar devotion on the part of the ocean or the man. This is actually what happens in 'Persuasion'. And thus, in the end, the poem leaves us with a greatly amplified view of the mutual devotion that can exist between man and wife. As Donne aptly put it, "If our two loves be one , or thou and I Love so alike that none doe slacken, none can die." Frost's position is essentially the same but what a wealth of meaning he has shown this position to involve!

The question inevitably arises, however, whether Frost actually intended his four lines to contain this extent of meaning. The answer is, probably not consciously; for he was thinking not literally but, as genuine poets tend to do, symbolically or metaphorically - as Blake, for example, did in his 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'. Frost has related elsewhere his experience of viewing the sea from an aeroplane. It is possible that the inspiration for 'Devotion' came from that insight into the symbiotic relationship of sea and shore that air travel uniquely affords. When a poet perceives a telling image, his imagination goes to work investing it with a significance of which he may be only partly aware, but which he knows is there because of the transformational power of his writing.

In any case, it does not matter. Because a poem, if it is truly a work of the imagination and not merely of the fancy, has a life of its own that transcends any conscious intent of the poet. As Stevens put it, "a poem is the cry of its occasion". It is "like an insatiable actor" taking over from the playwright and entering into a direct relationship with the reader, "speaking..that which it wants to hear...at the sound of which an invisible audience listens to itself expressed..." We get from a poem whatever it gives us provided we take it by giving careful attention to the text itself, justifying any understanding we may get from the words themselves and not from any private, extraneously imposed interpretation. Yet, this is not to pronounce that "the author is dead." None of the above reading of 'Devotion' could have come about without Frost's initiative and his imaginative power, his ability to think and express himself in symbol and metaphor. To him goes the credit for investing the particular of sea and shore with the universal of devotion.

Required proof

If proof were needed of the basic dependence of symbolic significance on the poet himself, we have only to look briefly at Penn Warrens's poem, 'The Sea Hates the Land'! Here the symbolism of sea and shore, now opposed to each other, has nothing to do with man and woman, with love and devotion. "One thing Remember: the sea hates the land, that arrogant, late Intruder on solitude's deep coil...between the unsleeping depth's unabat-Ing fulfilment of self and the undefinable span Of space forever seeking self's infinite end. You cannot blame the sea. For you. As a man, Know that only in loneliness are you defined."

The sea is the self and the land is that "otherness" which, to the existentialist, threatens his access to infinity, his self-fulfilment through self-determination. It is another version of the Sartre line, "Hell is other people." After considering Frost's life-affirming treatment of the shore-ocean metaphor, this poem seems profoundly life-denying. It seems to us that Penn Warren, to take a phrase from Lawrence, is "doing dirt on life.' Yet, here again we have to be alert to what the actor makes of the play.

The language is so strong that there seems to be some irony directed towards the implacably self-absorbed person. And the last couplet seems to confirm this suspicion: "The self had the joy of selflessness completely Absorbed in the innocent solipsism of the sea." That word "solipsism" with its pejorative connotation is studiedly ambiguous. It serves to place the emotion of the poem, show it up as slightly ridiculous! It is this sort of non-metaphorical ambiguity that we hope to examine next time.