YOU'RE an oxymoron!

The number of poems I analyze and my level of maturity are inversely proportional, so I apologize.

"A sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness" ("Delight in Disorder," 1-2).

I have a huge problem with Google Chrome's thinking that "villanelle" is a spelling error while "wantonness" is just fine. It's not even in my AHD! Oh, yes it is. Apparently, it's the noun form of "wanton," which means "immoral or unchaste." I'm going to leave it up in the air as to what the speaker is saying in those two lines. Anyway, my purpose in quoting that line was to point out the oxymoron "sweet disorder."

The speaker draws a lot of parallels between disorder/wildness and sweetness/civility, so he's very interested in waffles. I mean, he's very interested in disorder. This is reflected very nicely in the poem's structure! Allow me to explain.

The lines of the poem are not as pretty as they could be because the lengths of the lines are kind of jagged. Also, the rhyming is a little bit off, but it's there -- "thrown" and "distraction" (3-4), for instance. It has a continuous structure, so it's not cut up into nice even little stanzas. The poem has a certain degree of disorder to it, just like what the speaker likes!

I claim them all.

""'You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices'" (Brave New World, 237).

Like "rap music," "pleasant vices" is an oxymoron. I feel like I need to defend that statement -- vices are evil, and evil is not pleasant. The "vices" to which the Controller is referring are the voids of things like science, art, religion, and passion in the civilized world.

This oxymoron showcases the opposite values of Mustapha Mond and John. Mustapha Mond is willing to sacrifice science/art/religion/passion for stability. On the other hand, John believes that that sacrifice is taking away from the humanity in humans. He would be willing to sacrifice everlasting comfort for religion/God/freedom/sin. As John Green said, "The point of life is to be able to engage as deeply as possible with the miracle of human consciousness," and the civilized world in this book doesn't allow for that engagement. It's at 1:00:

On a related note, here's my favorite part of the book:

"'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last" (240).

I liked that quote so much that I was sure I had heard the line "I claim them all" in another book, but I couldn't find it anywhere else. Hmm, so, really good quote.