Can someone correct my writing on this oxYmoron

Question

Hello everyone!!I am back to this forum after a long time. Here is my question. It's about an oxymoron. the following are the first few lines of John Keat's famous poem 'An ode to a Grecian Urn.' Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,        Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express        A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:A friend told me that the phrase in the first line 'unravished bride' is an oxymoron and I did not think so. Given below is the explanation I wrote to him to prove that it was not an oxymoron. Please correct it and comment on the style.If the word was an oxymoron, it would substantiate the following propositions. 1  No bride is or can be found unravished. 2  A bride is never an unravished woman. 3  Bride means ravished. People may even laugh and say ‘a bride and unravished? That’s impossible!!’ Would any of them be a fair statement? Lexically, the word bride is associated with wedding. A bride is a woman just-married or about to marry. In case of the latter, it will be unfair to label her as ‘ravished’. Some women may have been ‘ravished’ before their wedding. But that is perhaps they consented to be so and many of them may even have cooperated during the process as they know well that remaining passive at that moment mars the joy of the very act. In the former case, well ..it depends how long they have been married. If they are still in the church or in the court, or just walking out of those institutions after the wedding, it eliminates the possibility of her having been ‘ravished’.   Come on..please..let them reach home or the hotel room booked for the purpose. Don’t make ravishment mandatory for a woman to turn her into a bride, otherwise It will open up the possibility of having a room in a court or even in a church where women have to be ravished first before they are announced as being lawful brides. Imagine a judge or a priest summoning a woman and a man [wanting to marry] into a secret chamber where he is to ravish her !! And then, when both of them came out tired and bleeding near the groin [or loin or both] the priest or the judge would say ‘now that you have, in the eyes of law [or lord almighty], willingly participated in the act, I therefore pronounce you bride and groom and bestow upon you the right to continue with rest of the wedding rituals. Won’t that be ridiculous? So please reconsider before taking  ‘unravished bride’ as an oxymoron

Clive · Accepted Answer

I'm not sure about the nuances of meaning of the word 'ravish' in the English of Keats's time, but in modern English it serves as a synonym for the word 'rape'.

My feeling is that many women today would feel uncomfortable or even offended by the tone in which you have written about this topic.

It would be better if someone of your powers of thought were to find another subject.

CalifJim · Answer

bubu prasantA friend told me that the phrase in the first line 'unravished bride' is an oxymoron and I did not think so.

oxymoron: a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction. Example: jumbo shrimp

unravished: virgin (possibly a metaphor for untouched when said of the urn)
bride: a woman who is getting married (possibly a metaphor for partner— a partner to "quietness" in this ode.)

From the three definitions above, 'unravished bride' can't be an oxymoron because there is no contradiction between the meanings of the two words.

bubu prasantGiven below is the explanation I wrote to him to prove that it was not an oxymoron. Please correct it and comment on the style.

I don't think you need all that text. My "proof" (above) is quite short.

CJ

Anonymous · Answer

Thank you Clive and califjim. I have been helped immensely by your answers several times. And it's great that you are still around to help English learners.

In the above writing my effort was to present the text in a satirically humorous way. [satire on considering the phrase 'ravished bride' as an oxymoron'. It's a delightful phrase capable of creating excellent poetic imagery which is often ruined by clumsy psydo intellectual analyses and therefore must be discouraged] but I never knew that I would end up making it offensive for women.[of course without my knowledge] but now that clive has made me aware of it, I realise that I must not write things, if I am not aware of the impact it can have on the readers. I am not a native speaker anyway.

Thank you again

by the way, I would very much like to know whether a native speaker would find the sentence of my writing twisted and turned or if there were grammatical mistakes.

Literature1O1 · Answer

Okay, so to answer your question, I think the phrase "unravished bride" has quite a lot of significance. The poet is through the first line of the poem, actually trying to initiate and show the connection between the said Urn and Quietness. Notice the use of the word "still" in this line; which can have two meaning. One, that this Urn has not yet been "ravished" by Quietness; and two, that the Urn is "still" in virtue - it is inanimate and itself is quiet. Here comes a bigger concept, which takes its roots in human psychology, and is somewhat of a realistic approach to love. When a bride has been ravished by her groom, that might be taken as an indication that she is aging, ever so slowly. Notice how in the second line, the poet speaks of "silence" and "slow time". The whole notion seems to hint, that this Urn has never been touched by the treacheries of time. For a bride who has been "ravished", and is aging, beauty is a lost race. She will inevitably lose her charm, and will not be as appealing to her husband at some point. But this Urn, whose groom is "Quietness", seems not to age, and remains virtuously quiet forever, almost as if "Quietness" cannot let go of her.
This whole concept can be referred to in the second paragraph as well, as the poet says -

"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare"

This again suggests that everything ages, and loses its charm. The singer will stop singing one day, the trees will shed their leaves and go bare someday. Spring always comes to an end and gives way to autumn. But in the case of this Urn, spring as if stays forever - it's quietness and silence, absolute, and lifeless.

The word "also" can be used in a negative sense to mean "destroyed". So, in saying "unravished", the poet might mean to suggest that this Urn has not been destroyed by the sharp fangs of time; that its quietness and not led it to solitude and loneliness, but rather to beauty and mystery, even though in the end it is but lifeless.

So either way, your pov is more corresponding to the literary sense of the word. But in the metaphorical sense, I think the word "ravished" refers to the state of being untouched (by time, in this case). That is to say, this Urn will forever remain unravished, and a "bride". This moment of its marriage has been frozen in time, it will neither ever get married, nor be ravished.

Can someone correct my writing on this oxYmoron

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions