I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 3 9question ‘How old are you?’ It is no answer at all. There seems to
be no connection between the two utterances. To claim that Yeats’s
phrase ‘terrible beauty’ may refer among other things to Maud
Gonne is not sheer speculation, like arguing that Virginia Woolf ’s
lighthouse is a symbol of the Indian Mutiny. We can read the figure
of Maud Gonne into the words ‘terrible beauty’ because we know
something of what she meant for Yeats, what ambiguities and
symbolic resonances she evoked for him, how he depicts her in
his other poems and so on. Critics have to be able to back up their
claims.
Which returns us to the question of why this version of ‘Baa
Baa Black Sheep’ may be invalid. How does one reply to someone
who exclaims ‘But it obviously can’t mean that!’ One retort is to
point out that I have just shown that it can. I have argued the case
line by line, adducing evidence for my claims and demonstrating
how the reading is coherent. Why is the phrase ‘Baa baa’ obviously
not a satirical bleat by the narrator? Where is the evidence to
say so? Who says that he doesn’t have an avaricious eye on the
sheep’s wool?
Where, however, is the evidence to say he does? It is true that
the poem does not actually state that the narrator is being boorish
and overbearing, or that the sheep is craftily trying to get even with
him. But literary texts often work by unspoken implications. In
fact, every utterance in the world depends on a whole host of such
implications – so many, in fact, that we would never be able to
explicate them all. To say ‘Put the garbage out’ is usually taken to
refer to one’s own garbage. There is no suggestion that one should
make a complicated, expensive trek to Hollywood in order to put
Jack Nicholson’s garbage out for him, even if the statement does
not actually rule it out. The Turn of the Screw does not tell us that