As a poetry nut, I immediately decided on this question. And although it seems a little tougher than the other options, I couldn't resist a chance to analyze poetry. The first four stanzas are talking about how something can be read a million different ways--when one chooses to start analyzing something, there seems to be an endless variety of interpretations that can be either very literal or figurative. In the first stanza, the author looks at how a line can be construed to mean something it doesn't obviously suggest--but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. "This is old song/ That will not declare itself..." suggests that it is much more difficult to arrive at these abstract meanings than a more concrete one, like the one that follows. By simply repeating the line "Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ Into a village," the author suggests that the line is literal and simply means what it looks like it means. And while this meaning "will not declare itself" either, it "is certain as meaning..." because how can one possibly be wrong in the meaning when that is simply what it says? A yellow house is a yellow house. The first stanza represents metaphor, when something literal comes to represent something more abstract and figurative, while in the third stanza both ideas are concrete and represent metonymy. This also contains shadows of context, in that depending on what context you read the piece about the twenty men might control how you interpret them. If the line is found in a lofty, intellectual story or poem, it can be counted on that the meaning probably won't be a literal as if the line were found in a first-person narrative on World War I, where it would mean exactly what it looks like it means.
The ellipses represent the endless variety of ways that a line can be interpreted, whether wrong or right. Yet the line "So the meaning escapes." seems very forlorn and hopeless, that without the author or some authoritative power, no one can truly understand what anything means. Who is to say it is literal or figurative, if not the author? And the fragmentary images at the end leave us with a sense of hopelessness, that nothing can be completely understood and absolutely correctly interpreted. Yet we still ponder them endlessly, trying our darndest to squeeze meaning out of them.
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BK: I salute your choice and this is excellent work. In some sense, I wonder about "This is old song/that will not declare itself..." speaking also to issues of how historical contexts of meaning are so very reluctant to change as well. It's almost as if the unspoken understandings we have are even more established and "permanent" even thourgh we rarely articulate them. :EE
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