ABSTRACT
Two oxymora-friendly terror and evil innocence-are semantically interpreted by readers not merely as a coexistence of the contradictory characteristics named. That is, friendly terror does not mean merely the notions of friendliness and terror added together; evil innocence on many readings means more than a neat balance of the antithetical ideas of evil and innocence. The divided intuitions of readers' responses indicate that the semantic relationship between the head noun and its modifying noun are part of the deep structure, the level of meaning. The context of the poem may not only legitimatize individual readers' responses, but it may also reveal how the contradictions in interpretation may be reconciled so that they produce the sense of the true nature of life-the enigmatic contradictions of human experience and the complexity of reality. The diverse interpretations thus produce the illusion of life, a mimesis of the psychological reality of a situation, experience, or event which is described by the oxymoron.
