Response

Lucrece cannot read Tarquin. "Nor read the subtle shining secrecies, / VVrit in the glassie margents of such bookes" — Shakespeare. The word that matters is *margents*: the meaning is not in the text but in the margins, the glosses, the apparatus that surrounds the central utterance. Lucrece fails not because the message is too difficult but because she does not know there is a message. She lacks the frame that would make legibility possible. This is the opposite of Prynne's wager. Prynne assumes a reader who knows there is a message and bets everything on the difficulty of extracting it — the obscurity is the proof that something is at stake. Shakespeare gives us a reader for whom no amount of clarity would help, because the problem is not decoding but recognition: she does not know she is being read *at*. The distinction between obscurity that serves meaning and obscurity that deflects it depends on a prior question — whether the reader knows they are in the presence of a text at all. Self-implication begins not with difficulty but with the moment of recognising you have been addressed.

Beatrice in Shelley's *The Cenci* knows exactly what she needs to say and knows she cannot say it. "If I could find a word that might make known / The crime of my destroyer" — Shelley. The conditional is doing all the work: the crime is "unimaginable, wrapped / In hideous hints" — Shelley. This is not erudite obscurity. It is obscurity imposed by power — the offender's gold, the accuser's impossible position. The unspeakable here is not a poetic strategy but a social fact. And yet the effect on the reader is structurally identical to what happens with maximum-difficulty poetry: we are given hints, we are made to work, we are implicated by the labour of inference. The difference — and it is a real difference — is that Beatrice's obscurity is compelled and Prynne's is elected. One is the silence of the powerless; the other is the silence of the initiated. Both produce the same reader: someone who must decide whether the difficulty is worth entering, and who becomes complicit in the meaning the moment they try.

Wordsworth watching Burke in the Commons lands the blow most precisely. "Words follow words, sense seems to follow sense: / What memory and what logic! till the strain / Transcendent, superhuman as it seemed, / Grows tedious even in a young man's ear" — Wordsworth. *Seems* twice in four lines. The eloquence is real — Wordsworth will go on to compare Burke to an oak — but the passage begins with a listener who cannot tell whether sense is actually following sense or only seeming to. This is the phenomenology of the difficult text from the inside. The reader caught in Burke's rhetoric, or Prynne's syntax, or Spenser's allegorical thicket where "Pryene" appears as a name half-swallowed by its own stanza, experiences a suspension between meaning and the appearance of meaning. That suspension is not a failure of reading. It is the reading. Wordsworth's young man does not resolve whether Burke's strain is transcendent or tedious — the line break after "seemed" holds both possibilities open for exactly one breath. You are implicated not by exclusion and not by labour but by the fact that you cannot stop performing the evaluation. You are always already deciding whether the difficulty is real. That decision — not the decoding — is where the poem has you.