A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
(Paradise Lost, Excerpt, Line 63-64)
John Milton used “those flames no light” in Paradise Lost. In this poem, oxymoron expresses the subtle feelings of people and is regarded as contradictory in form but logical and illuminating in content. As for “those flames no light”, although it indicates a very complex feelings, oxymoron makes it has terse and lively style.
Thirdly, oxymoron has the creativity of the structure. Generally, people use some words which are unified and harmonious to describe something and somebody, instead of using the opposite and contradictory words. Therefore, it’s creative that oxymoron uses contradictory words to express complex feelings. Some examples are list, such as, ‘painful pleasure’, ‘ugly-beautiful’, and so on.
Last but not least, oxymoronic expressions have the characteristic of wisdom. People are often employed to bring to light implicitly and vividly the truths in many proverbs in the objective and complicated world. Such as, “a timeless time”, time is fixed and what changes is only how people feel about it. But oxymoron gives the subjective impression and creative structure for people under certain circumstances.
Above all oxymoron is a symbol of a certain philosophical thought-anything containing two sides, negative and positive, but the two opposite forces can stay harmoniously.
III. The Formation of Oxymoron
According to the definition of oxymoron, it is a rhetorical figure by which contradictory or incongruous terms are conjoined. Oxymoron possesses a relatively fixed and concrete concept, so it also possesses a relatively fixed structure in form. Because this kind of rhetorical device consists of just two or few terms, the different forms of its structure are decided by the different configurations of these terms. From the aspect of structure, oxymoron has two kinds of formation, which respectively are the external structure and the internal structure 矛盾修辞法在文学作品中的应用(3):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_14322.html