H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 3 4way. Almost certainly not. Even so, you can choose to interpret a
piece of writing in ways it plainly did not or could not anticipate.
There may be some seriously strange types who find manuals for
assembling table lamps hauntingly poetic in their descriptions of
plugs and flexes, and who read them avidly far into the night. Such
manuals might even have proved cause for divorce. Yet it is unlikely
that whoever wrote them would have anticipated such a use.
The question, then, is why ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ cannot
mean what I have suggested it means. Why is this reading illicit,
if indeed it is?
We cannot, of course, appeal to the author’s meaning here,
because we have no idea who the author was. Even if we did, it
would not necessarily settle the question. Authors can offer
accounts of their own works which sound even more absurd than
the one I have just provided for ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. T.S. Eliot, for
example, once described The Waste Land as no more than a piece
of rhythmical grousing. The only problem with this comment is
that it is palpably untrue. Thomas Hardy quite often disclaimed
having any views at all about the controversial subjects presented
in his fiction. When asked what one of his more obscure poems
meant, Robert Browning is said to have replied, ‘When I wrote this
poem, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant. Now, God
knows.’ If Sylvia Plath were to have confided that her poetry was
really about collecting antique clocks, we would probably be forced
to conclude that she was mistaken. There are writers who consider
their work to be examples of high seriousness when they are hilari-
ously, unintentionally funny. We shall be considering such an
author at the very end of the book. Another example is the Book of
Jonah, which is probably not intended to be funny but which is
brilliantly comic without seeming to be aware of it.