III: Homage to a Wry Senescence

I once met William Empson live,
a silent, quirky old coot
who later gave a lecture I forgot.
I also met a man doing
a doctorate on seven forms
of ambiguity who knew him
in Hampstead and as much as
said that he was senile, an
artifact of exquisite cleverness
gone to rot, listening to the
Northern Line rumble beneath
his garden. One thing that
I will always have from
Empson, though, was in an
article that same year that
rambled on about WW II,
intelligence, and Singapore,
asserting that we cheat the
censor by using irony. Perhaps
that's what my academic
colleague (and I)
failed to see.