Delight in Disorder by Robert Herrick

Delight in Disorder
By Robert Herrick

Background:
Herrick only published one volume of poems, Hesperides, in 1948. Many of his earlier poems were happy and charming, although they carry a deeper meaning. His poems reflect the cultural war going on between the royalists, who wanted more traditional English culture, and Puritans, who were much more ordered and clean. He supported the slightly sloppy English royalists, not the overly precise Puritans.

Words, terms, and phrases
Wantonness: can mean recklessness in general or in a sexual context (l. 2)
Lawn: fine linen scarf (l. 3)
Erring: wandering (l. 5)
Stomacher: ornamental covering of the chest worn under the laces of the bodice (l. 6)
Precise: used satirically about puritans (l. 14)

Discussion Questions
1. Herrick compares women to art. What does this show about British culture in the 16th century?
2. What does Herrick’s merely physical description of women show about his view of them?
3. How does Herrick feel about perfection?
4. How are the subject and tone of this poem (and the poet’s message) different from other British poems from the same time period?
5. How do the diction and format of the poem reflect disorder?

Robert Herrick’s Delight in Disorder is a charming salute to imperfection and “sweet disorder.” He describes different ways a woman’s clothes can be disordered: a linen scarf thrown around the shoulders, a piece of lace which sways around, an untied cuff leaving ribbons flowing, a wrinkle in the chaotic petticoat, an untied shoe. Herrick finds that all of these imperfections, which show slight wantonness - recklessness, which could also be seen as a sexual innuendo – are more appealing to him than precise, meticulously detailed art. He sees an oxymoronic “wild civility” in these women. He compares a woman’s appearance, more specifically her clothes, to art, showing that he views woman as objects to be observed; he never mentions one woman in particular, nor does he describe anything about her actual being, body or soul.
The structure, ironically, is quite ordered in a poem about the beauty of disorder. The meter is mainly dactylic quatrameter, and the rhyme scheme is 7 pairs of rhyming lines. The tone of the poem is light, nonchalant, and quick, partly from the rhyme scheme and meter, and also from diction. Herrick uses alliteration and consonance to add whimsy; pairings such as “winning wave,” “shoe-string,” and “kindles in clothes” sound playful and happy. Long, jumbled words also add to a feeling of blissful disorder, with words like “tempestuous petticoat,” “wantonness,” and “crimson stomacher.” Perhaps, since the structure of the poem is rigid but the diction is more whimsical and disordered, Herrick implies that women’s effect on the senses (sound of diction and sight of disordered clothes) is what defines them rather than their more concrete characteristics.