The World Literature Blog

Ampat Koshy: If you know of the seven types of ambiguity approaching the poem may become easier. The first note of ambiguity for me is what Arun Kolatkar means in the second line by saying that her insomnia may seep through the great walls of history. Does he mean women down the ages have insomnia? I think so. The use of "may" throws things a bit into confusion. Is she to be taken seriously or not? Now we come to the crux of the poem which is somewhat but not entirely patriarchal. She is lonely, as she has no one to spend time with her. Then we come to the key line about the spiked man who can be spiked as in a drink is spiked meaning drunken on alcohol or her and impaling suggests an act of force, but we are unable to decide if he is husband or lover or a random person, and it could even be rape. What the recipe signifies is anyone's guess coming immediately after. Her whimper being null and void suggests her insignificance and the insignificance of all women in a city and patriarchal set up. Further on 'darkling' refers to the nightingale in Keats, perhaps, and is child of dark suggesting perhaps her skin tone as well as how a woman perhaps made pregnant out of wedlock or by rape is seen by the doctors, maybe in India. Shoot up connects with spiked and impale with explode - are the doctors too not adding to the crime if she is being aborted? She 'may' still only damn man. She curses humanity by poisoning 23 cockroaches - is there a pun on cock and roach? - but at the same time maybe it suggests that she prefers humanity still despite everything, mistakenly, or not, due to being brainwashed or not, and not cockroaches that may survive a nuclear holocaust. To sum up, there may still be an undertow of disturbing patriarchy in the poem but it succeeds due to the use of ambiguity and 'undecidability' and indeterminacy in it (Marjorie Perloff's terms) that makes it cut both ways or many ways in terms of meanings it can generate in the minds of different readers. "Seven types of Ambiguity
1.The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.
2.Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.
3.Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.
4.Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.
5.When the author discovers his idea in the act of writing. Empson describes a simile that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.
6.When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.
7.Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the author's mind." I find most of these types of ambiguity at work here - should explicate more on that later