The notion of a complex irony itself suggests a multiplicity of relations, and Empson's treatment of Shakespeare's sonnet number 94, ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’, makes of the elaboration of irony its most powerful exploratory device, as well as using ‘irony’ as its central explanatory term. The multiple relations could, of course, be of many kinds, could involve concepts drawn from the most varied intellectual sources, with ‘irony’ itself expressing the subversive relationships that these might reflect upon each other. Yet it seems a difficult term to use in any schematised way - we are not tempted to ‘seven types of irony’, perhaps because something simply conceived becomes pervasively reflexive and extends itself through the kind of complication that eludes typology. This finds its first step in a recognition of the startlingly indeterminate: ‘you can work through all of the notes in the Variorum without finding out whether flower, lily “owner”, and person addressed are alike or opposed’. The scope of the task and the innate impossibility are faced directly: ‘One would like to say that the poem has all possible such meanings, digested into some order, and then try to show how this is done, but the mere number of possible interpretations is amusingly too great’. The permutations of like and unlike yield ‘4096 possible movements of thought, with other possibilities’.