‘Delight In Disorder’ and ‘Still to Be Neat’ reflect the feelings of how women feel about societal expectations of the ‘dress codes’. However, both poems fluctuate between the ideal picture of a woman.
“Disorder” is the main concept in ‘Delight in Disorder’, a disorder is stated as an illness that disrupts normal physical or mental function. Knowing this, the author uses ‘disorder’ as an underlying meaning to show that the clothes on women are not the problem to ‘disruption’, it’s the brains of antagonists who mentally disrupt themselves. The main theme of this poem is to show how women’s clothes are “distracting”, based off of key words in the poem “shoulders thrown, Into a fine distraction” , “tempestuous petticoat”, and “bewitch me”. Shoulders are used to indicate the stressed dress codes within schools. Using “tempestuous petticoat”, which is a piece of clothing that are predominantly used by kids, to show that girls at a young age dealt with strict dress codes. Ending off the poem “Do more bewitch me. . . “ , is more of a screw the patriarchy , to “demoralize” them. The energy in this poem comes off soft and mellow in the beginning which then trails off to be more stressed and the phrases come off more of an attack to the reader. Herrick uses iambic tetrameter through the ups and downs of the stressed and unstressed.
The speakers reservations about the lady in the first stanza is to show how women are supposed to dress lady like. This poem has a rhythm of a iamic tetrameter based off of the stressed and unstressed lines. The poet creates this vision in the readers head of a typical ladylike of a women, but ends off the poem of how women are humans too with personalities. Jonson writes about how women are more perceived as ‘eye-candy’ as seen in line 7, “Give me a look, give me a face”. The iambic rhythm of this poem fluctuates between womens’ physical features to not having a genuine connection with women who are ‘lady like’. Where this is seen in the last line, it says “ They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.”
Both poems have the same flow of iambic tetrameter. Jonson and Herrick uses the same social issue, however are different concepts of what women have faced for centuries. ‘Delight in Disorder’ depicts a clearer and bigger social issue than ‘Still to Be Neat’.
Roma Ventura
Introduction to Poetry 