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Delight in Disorder
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“What Kind of Mistress He Would Have” by Robert Herrick (1648)
This poem, also published in Hesperides, details similar ideas regarding what an ideal woman might be and uses wording that is almost the same as that in “Delight in Disorder.” Touching on order and disarray, the speaker suggests that the would-be mistress will be
[p]ure enough, though not precise
Be she showing in her dress
Like a civil wilderness
That the curious may detect
Order in a sweet neglect (Lines 19-23).
This is similar to the phrasing in “Delight in Disorder,” in which the speaker contrasts the “too precise” (Line 14) artifice they don’t like with the “wild civility” (Line 12) they do. Further, the “sweet neglect” (Line 23) in “The Mistress He Would Have” is just a rewriting of the “sweet disorder” (Line 1) in “Delight in Disorder.” The mistress’s hair is also described as “an enchantment, or a snare” (Line 12), much like how the woman’s easy dressing in “Delight in Disorder” “bewitch[es]” (Line 13) the speaker.
“Upon Julia’s Clothes” by Robert Herrick (1648)
In this poem, Herrick’s speaker also focuses on a woman wearing a garment. Here, Julia wears “silks” (Line 1), and the speaker marvels “how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes” (Lines 2-3). This is similar to how the speaker in “Delight in Disorder” fixates on “a winning wave, deserving note / In the tempestuous petticoat” (Lines 9-10). In “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” the speaker is taken with how they see “[t]hat brave vibration each way free / O how that glittering taketh [them]!” (Lines 5-6). This is a similar kinetic image to the skirt and the “ribands [that] flow confusedly” (Line 8) from the open sleeve. In this way, the descriptions of Julia’s clothes repeat the imagery of the “wild civility” (Line 12) that the speaker sees in the woman’s “careless shoestring” (Line 11). The symbolic nature of clothes is explored in both poems.
“Still to Be Neat, Still to Be Dressed” by Ben Jonson (1609)
It is well-known that Robert Herrick was a member of the “Tribe of Ben” at Cambridge, a group of young poets profoundly influenced by Ben Jonson, the playwright and poet (See: Background). Specifically, “Still to Be Neat, Still to Be Dressed,” which appeared in Jonson’s 1609 play Epicœne, may have been Herrick’s template for “Delight in Disorder.” Jonson’s speaker addresses a “[l]ady” (Line 4) as she “powder[s] [and] perfume[s]” (Line 3) and is distressed at her artifice because “[a]ll is not sweet, all is not sound” (Line 6). The speaker urges her to “make simplicity a grace” (Line 8) and don “robes loosely flowing, hair as free” (Line 9), pointing out that they’re more attracted to “sweet neglect” (Line 10) over “th’adulteries of art / [which] strike [their] eyes, but not [their] heart” (Line 12). This is directly echoed by Herrick’s speaker’s observation of the “sweet disorder” (Line 1) of a woman’s dress and how it “do[es] more to bewitch [them], than when art / Is too precise in every part” (Lines 13-14).The main difference between Herrick’s poem and Jonson’s is that Herrick’s speaker is less intimate with the woman in “Delight in Disorder,” viewing her from a distance.
Further Literary Resources
“Bodies or Stays? Underwear or Outwear? Seventeenth-Century Foundation Garments Explained” by Sarah A. Bendall (2019)
Sarah A. Bendall is a fashion historian and the author of Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body, and Women in Early Modern England (2021). Her website features many entries on historical fashion and details how a woman of the time period of Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder” would be dressed. This entry features descriptions of bodices, petticoats, and stomachers and includes photographs of a laced “crimson stomacher” (Line 6), which might be helpful when visualizing Herrick’s poem. She also mentions that some bodices of the period “contain detachable sleeves (that are laced on with points),” which may account for the loose “ribands” (Line 8) the speaker describes. Bendall also links an article by Drea Leed about petticoats. Petticoats were primarily red as well, but women of the court had other color options.
“‘The Uncanny Stranger on Display’: The Female Body in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Love Poetry” by Moira P. Baker (1991)
This article, published in South Atlantic Review, uses a feminist perspective to discuss male poetry of the Renaissance, including “Delight in Disorder.” Baker believes that Herrick’s speaker “seems to ask a reader to see in the woman’s clothing her own wantonness, her willful seductiveness, for she dresses so as to make her clothes a token of her own lasciviousness.” However, she also argues, “Yet the ambiguous reference of ‘kindles’ and ‘wanton-nesse’ seems simultaneously to suggest the lasciviousness of the poet's response ‘kindled’ by her clothes.” Baker discusses how Herrick objectifies the body in both “Delight in Disorder” and “Upon Julia’s Clothes” to explore not the physical but the mental fantasies of the male speaker.
The Oxford History of Poetry in English, Volume 5, edited by Laura L. Knoppers (2024)
In Chapter 15, on the epigram form, Ann Baynes Coiro notes that the poems collected in Hesperides were “written for early Caroline court celebrations,” containing “erotic fantasies, and, threaded throughout, poems about the English civil war and the king’s looming defeat” (201). Coiro also indicates that “Herrick’s model is Jonson and Jonson’s Martial: poems grouped loosely together so that readers must make their own sense out of randomness, contradiction, and embedded sequences […] [A]ny [Herrick] poem is made richer when read in sequence” (201).
In Chapter 29, Nicholas McDowell covers the history of the Cavalier Poets—Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace—and explains the difficulties of grouping the wide-ranging poets this way since only Lovelace served in the English Civil War. He notes that in terms of poetics, they share “a vaguely libertine attitude to women and wine and the attachment to Ben Jonson’s literary and social values” (394). He does note that the group used the self-titled “Sons of Ben” or “Tribe of Ben” to identify themselves. It was when Herrick’s poems were published in 1648 that “they assumed a new resonance” because “Herrick’s recurring celebration of festive and religious ritual would immediately have identified the poet’s [political] allegiance” (397).
Listen to the Poem
The Poetry Archive and The Times broadcast an event on Wednesday February 10, 2010, to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Several actors read poems, including Alan Rickman, who read “Delight in Disorder” and “Upon Julia’s Clothes.” This uploaded 2021 version includes visuals of a woman on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the words of Herrick’s poem, and Rickman’s reading of it.
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By Robert Herrick
