Seven Types of Ambiguity: All 7 Types Explained

Essay Q1

Explain Empson's First, Third, and Seventh Types of Ambiguity with examples.

Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) arranges verbal ambiguity on a scale of increasing complexity and psychological depth — from the cooperation of meanings (Type 1) through their disconnection (Type 3) to their fundamental contradiction (Type 7). The First Type is the simplest and most pervasive: a word or phrase that is effective in several ways at once, all meanings cooperating rather than competing. Empson's most celebrated example is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73: 'Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.' He identified at least nine simultaneous valid readings: the physical image of winter boughs stripped of leaves; the boughs shaped like the arches of ruined monastery choir-stalls; the dissolved abbeys of Henry VIII's Reformation, their choirs now silent; the choirboys who sang in those choirs; the birds who now take the choirboys' place as 'sweet singers'; the parallel between the season and the ageing speaker; the cold bare quality of both winter branches and stone ruin; the absence of music as a kind of presence; and 'late' meaning both 'recently' and 'formerly'. All nine are simultaneously present and mutually enriching — none cancels another. This is ambiguity at its most productive: the meanings multiply and deepen the image without contradicting each other. The Third Type involves two apparently disconnected meanings given simultaneously — as in a pun, where two meanings belong to genuinely different 'universes of discourse' and remain separate rather than resolving into each other. Empson extends this type to allegory and pastoral: the Elizabethan pastoral poem operates in two worlds simultaneously — the surface world of shepherds and seasons and the subterranean world of poets, courtiers, and literary politics. In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the word 'die' (to die / to have an orgasm) keeps two entirely different domains active at the same time; neither cancels the other; they remain disconnected yet simultaneously present. The Seventh Type is the most extreme — 'full contradiction marking a fundamental division in the author's mind.' Here the ambiguity is not merely linguistic but psychological: the poem contains two irreconcilable meanings because the author is genuinely, fundamentally divided. Empson connects this to Freud's condensation: just as the Id and the Superego are compressed into a single dream image, the author's divided consciousness condenses into contradictory language. His primary example is George Herbert's 'The Sacrifice', where a theological split that Herbert cannot resolve — between horror at the cruelty of the crucifixion and joyful acceptance of its redemptive sweetness — produces irreconcilable meanings throughout the poem. The contradiction is not a flaw; it is the poem's meaning.

Essay Q2

Write a note on the origin, significance, and critical reception of Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) has a remarkable origin story that illuminates both its method and its significance. The book began as a word game. Laura Riding and Robert Graves demonstrated to the young William Empson — then an undergraduate at Cambridge — how many simultaneous readings could be produced from Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 ('Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame') by exploiting the original unpunctuated text. Empson, reportedly astonished, said: 'You could do that with any poetry, couldn't you?' His supervisor I.A. Richards — who had himself been transforming literary education through the close-reading experiments that would become Practical Criticism (1929) — took this as a challenge and sent Empson away to make good on the claim. Empson returned the following week with 30,000 words. This manuscript, submitted as his Cambridge English Tripos dissertation, became Seven Types of Ambiguity. The significance of the book lies in three areas. First, it transformed the concept of ambiguity: where previous criticism had treated verbal ambiguity as a defect — a failure of clarity or precision to be corrected in revision — Empson argued that ambiguity is the defining feature of great poetry and the primary source of its richness and depth. 'Any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language' is not a problem; it is a resource. Second, the book established close reading as a serious, systematic, and learnable critical practice. Empson did not merely assert that language is complex; he demonstrated it at length through hundreds of specific textual examples — from Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Hopkins, and Swinburne. The range and precision of these demonstrations made the book both a scholarly achievement and a practical manual. Third, the book provided the New Critical movement with some of its most important theoretical and methodological foundations. Cleanth Brooks' theory of paradox, Wimsatt and Beardsley's argument for 'objective criticism', and I.A. Richards' own development of practical criticism were all shaped by Empson's demonstration. The book was controversial and has remained so. Some critics argued that Empson found ambiguity everywhere because he was looking for it — that his readings were sometimes more ingenious than valid. F.R. Leavis, though admiring the analytical intelligence, questioned whether all seven types were equally coherent or useful. The Seventh Type, with its Freudian underpinning, attracted particular debate. In the third edition (1953), Empson responded to critics and revised some examples — most notably the 'bare ruined choirs' analysis. Despite these controversies, the book has never been displaced as one of the most important and influential works in the history of literary criticism.

Essay Q3

Explain how Empson uses Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 to demonstrate the First Type of Ambiguity.

Empson's analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 — specifically the phrase 'Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang' — is the most celebrated single passage in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and it remains one of the most famous demonstrations of close reading in the history of literary criticism. Empson uses this phrase to illustrate the First Type of Ambiguity: a detail or phrase that is effective in several ways at once, all meanings cooperating rather than competing or contradicting. He argues that what makes this line so powerful is precisely that it does not work on one level but on many simultaneously, and that the reader holds all these levels in mind at once — the meaning is not one of them but all of them together. The readings Empson identifies include: (1) The literal, physical image of winter tree branches bare of leaves — this is the explicit vehicle of the metaphor comparing the ageing speaker to late autumn; (2) The boughs as they appear against the sky resemble the arched columns and vaulted ceilings of a Gothic choir — the structural parallel to ecclesiastical architecture; (3) The 'ruined choirs' specifically evoke the dissolution of the English monasteries under Henry VIII — the Reformation ruins that Elizabethan travellers would encounter, stone arches open to the sky, silent and deserted; (4) The choirboys who sang in those monastic choirs — now absent, like the leaves and the birds; (5) The actual sweet-singing birds (perhaps larks or nightingales) that nested in the summer trees and have now migrated or fallen silent in the cold; (6) The parallel between the silent choir and the ageing speaker — both once filled with music and life, both now approaching their final silence; (7) The visual quality shared by bare winter branches and bare ruined stone — both cold, bare, stripped; (8) The word 'late' working simultaneously as 'recently' (the birds sang here recently) and 'formerly' (the birds used to sing here — implying permanent absence); (9) The silence itself as a felt presence — the birds are gone, the choristers are gone, but the image of their singing fills the silence. What matters is not that any one of these readings is the 'correct' one — the point is that all nine are simultaneously valid, simultaneously present in the language, and mutually reinforcing. The line works so well because it is all of these things at once. This is the First Type at its most complex and most beautiful. Empson's analysis was itself controversial: some critics have argued that not all of his nine readings are equally persuasive, and Empson himself added a note in the 1953 edition addressing specific objections. But the fundamental demonstration — that a six-word phrase can sustain nine legitimate simultaneous readings, all enriching the same lyric moment — established both the power of the method and the ambition of the book.