Unresolved poetic Ambiguity

We have seen in the last two articles how poetic ambiguity works either through metaphor or irony or through both together to convey two or more possible meanings in a single statement. In the three examples we considered from Frost, Marvell and Shakespeare, it was evident that the poet was aware of and intended the ambivalent effect he was creating.

But there is also a poetic ambiguity wherein the poet may be unaware of the equivocal nature of his utterance; that in saying one thing he may be implying another quite different thing at the same time. This unresolved type of ambiguity is often the more intriguing, and an example of it is to be found in Philip Larkin's 'Wedding-Wind':

This is a poem about a bride's first taste of wedded bliss. The wind that rages through her wedding day and on into the night is obviously a symbol of the way she is swept off her feet by the sudden joy of marital intimacy.

In the middle of the night they are disturbed by "a stable door..banging again and again, That he must go and shut it, leaving me Stupid in candlelight, hearing rain, Seeing my face in the twisted candlelight, Yet seeing nothing."

The interruption leaves her feeling momentarily empty without him, noticing nothing in her impatience for his return. When he comes back and reports that "the horses were restless...I was sad That any man or beast that night should lack The happiness I had."

Phillip Larkin

Do we note that a note of anxious regret has been touched, however lightly, in the phrases "leaving me stupid" and "I was sad"? Is there, perhaps, a disruptive element in the intoxicating nature of the whirlwind of passion?

This suggestion is deepened in the second stanza. "Now in the day All's ravelled under the sun by the wind's blowing. He has gone to look at the floods, and I Carry a chipped pail to the chicken-run, Set it down and stare."

Once again her husband is distracted, once again she finds herself alone in the vacancy of suspense. But the wind is still at work, "Hunting through clouds and forests, thrashing My apron and hanging cloths on the line." This is a beautiful, almost Lawrentian, evocation of the way that romantic fulfilment can bring about a sense of oneness with one's circumambient universe so that even insignificant tasks are performed in a daze of ecstatic wonderment. Nothing can seem to erase the joy of the night. The persistence of the wind suggests that it will always be like this, and she wonders:

"Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread Carrying beads? Shall I be let sleep Now this perpetual morning shares my bed? Can even death dry up These new delighted lakes, conclude Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?" The image of the wind tossing the cloths on her line is developed as an embodiment of her joy. But there is also the implicit image of this joy tossing her actions about like the wind the cloths. These in turn are compared to beads on a breakable thread. Despite her rapturous state she senses, unmistakably to us but unawares to herself, her innate fragility and the fragility of life itself.

This provides the rationale for the question "can it be borne?" The thought of marital fulfilment being an inexhaustible, almost "death"-defying prospect, the "floods" caused by the wind having provided fresh "lakes" or water-sources for the cattle, is almost too much to comprehend. She wonders if she can ever "sleep" or be herself again in the midst of this "perpetual" bliss.

Finally a mood of worshipful awe seems to take over, suggested by the language: "kneeling", 'all-generous", "waters", and the implication of eternity, "can even death...conclude?" Her cup of happiness could not be fuller, but at its heart is a fundamental though unconscious sense of insecurity. This started with the husband leaving her alone in the night and again in the daytime and was quietly deepened with the imagery discussed in the previous paragraph. We realise that the poet has dramatised his own feelings about marriage.

He recognises it as being capable of providing a greater form of exhilaration and fulfilment than any other human experience. Yet he dreads it, disbelieving both in his own ability to live up to its promise and in the prospect of continued upliftment it holds out.

The poem thus reflects Larkin's mixed, even confused, feelings not only about marriage, but about the Lawrentian call to be continually "man alive" and "woman alive", to be constantly in tune with one's innate sexuality in order to keep the union of man and wife valid. Lawrence did not, of course, contemplate the need for there being other considerations beyond romantic passion. Nor, evidently, did Larkin who was a confirmed misogamist, though by no means a misogynist.

Sense of foreboding

The point is that a poem that sets out to celebrate the ecstatic thoughts of a newly-married woman conveys a sense of foreboding about the future. This ambivalence is achieved entirely through the symbolism of the wind and the subsidiary imagery. Metaphor invariably plays a part in this form of unresolved ambiguity. This is seen further in the Warren poem we considered some weeks ago, 'Myth of Mountain Sunrise.'

This poem purports to convey the thought, as the title indicates, that sunrise is a myth, an illusion. Daytime and all its manifestations are transient. It is the night-time communication of the mountain with itself and its surroundings that holds the unfathomable secret of the meaning of existence. Dawn cannot change this: "The mountain dimly wakes, stretches itself on windlessness. Feels its deep chasm, waking, yawn. The curdling agony of interred dark strives dayward, in stone strives though No light here enters, has ever entered but In ageless age of primal flame.

Even the foliage that begins to appear with sunrise acknowledges the magnetism of the mountain. "Leaf cries: 'I feel my deepest filament in dark rejoice. I know that the density of basalt has a voice.'" But now, surprisingly, the day begins to make is presence felt. "How soon will the spiderweb, dew-dapled gleam In Pompeian glory! Think of a girl-shape, birch-white sapling rising now from ankle-deep brook-stones, head back-flung, eyes clothed in first beam, While hair-long, water-roped, past curve, coign, sway that no geometries know-Spreads end-thin, to define fruit-swell of haunches, tingle of hand-hold. The sun blazes over the peak. That will be the old tale told."

The emerging day is introduced in its "Pompeian", ie. doomed, glory. It is as frail as a spiderweb and as short-lived as the dew. Then comes the astounding image of a young tree coming into view in the morning light. It is a synechdoche of daytime splendour, itself personified as a sublimely graceful young girl. One thinks of the Hopkinsian line, "sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace". Even though it was introduced as something tenuous the presence of the day becomes overpoweringly beautiful. We are as compelled by this daytime imagery as we were by the night-time imagery of the mountain. In other words, the "blazing" radiance of the day and all it represents of the pride of life, is irresistible. The sombre wisdom of the mountain in the night is, for the time being, forgotten.

Dark challenge

Thus, the "myth" or "the old tale" that is being repeated is two-fold or ambivalent - it is as false to say that the reality of the dark is challenged by the glory of the day as it is to say that the glory of the day is invalidated by the reality of the dark. For two things that would seem to be incompatible are juxtaposed in this poem, each having its own validity and the one unable to outdo the other. The overpowering impression of the poem is that both realities are as irrefutable as they are refutable.

The reader is forced, unwittingly by the poet, to confront this paradox. Perhaps we could feel overwhelmed by such ambiguity and exclaim with Hamlet, tested by the double ententes of the graveyard clown, that "equivocation will undo us."