Bare Ruined Choirs

Jonathan Raban quotes what may be the single best-known paragraph in 20th Century literary criticism--William Empson on Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

Because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because theyare now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choirboys suits well with Shakespeare's feeling fore the object of the Sonners, and for varius sociological and historical reasons (the Protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of Puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

That's Raban appreciating Empsosn in the London Review of Books, 5 November 2009, 37-41, 38. The quotation is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73.