Summary

The speaker notes that disordered clothes lead to strange behavior. A piece of fabric around the shoulders is distracting. The laces on a corset can come undone. An unbuttoned cuff or untied petticoat flows in the wind. The poet concludes that these mistakes in dress are engrossing, much more so than a perfect appearance.

Analysis

In the early modern period, the connection between sexual behavior, physical uncleanliness, and morality was a strong one. These attitudes – particularly the explicit connection of sexual misbehavior with untidiness – may seem strange to contemporary readers, but they were common at the time Herrick was writing. For instance, the word “slattern,” which survives in the somewhat archaic adjective “slatternly” (meaning sexually promiscuous), originally meant “a woman who kept a dirty house." “Wanton” could mean sexually promiscuous or just physically untidy. And the modern slur “slut” descends from the early modern...