Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Robert Herrick, a 17th century English poet and a minister. He lived from

1591 to 1694. He's best known for his book Hesperides, Hesperities, which is a book of poems,

which includes a very famous poem called To the Virgins to Make Much of Time. And it's got that

first line that you've probably heard before, gather ye rosebuds while you may. But the poem that

I'm going to read today is called Delight in Disorder.

This is how it goes. A sweet disorder in the dress kindles in clothes, a wantonness, a lawn about the

shoulders thrown into a fine distraction, an erring lace, which here and there enthralls the crimson

stomacher, a cuff neglectful, and thereby ribbons to flow confusedly.

A winning wave, deserving note, in the tempestuous petticoat, a careless shoestring, in whose

tie I see a wild civility. Do more bewitch me than when art is too precise

in every part so this poem has a couple of visual things to stand out you know the first time

you ever read it you'll'll notice them. Every two

lines, every couplet ends with a colon. So you've got one, two, three, four, five, six

colons, all leading to the final couplet, which says, do more bewitch me than when art is too precise

in every part. So we have these six rhyming couplets, which then leads into that final

couplet, which is sort of our resolution, it's the theme of the whole poem, kind of stated

pretty neatly. It's as if each of those couplets before are numbers that are going to

add up to something, almost like a mathematical equation or something like that.

But there's also some really nice lines in here,

some nice line work.

In her book, The Rules for the Dance,

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