7 ambiguities

15Dec09

“In the dead wast and middle of the night” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.ii.198.) Wast seems to be a pun on ‘waste,’ ‘waist, and ‘vast’; if ‘waist,’ it has a strong common factor with middle; if ‘vast,’ the connection could be that the night seems longest when you are in the middle of it; if ‘waste,’ the [...]

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Tags: ambiguity, art, cables, hamlet, leopard print, lighting, night, photography, plants, poetics, portrait, shakespeare, tapestry, waste, william empson