‘This is the end of a perfect day, Jeeves. What’s that thing of yours about larks?’
'Sir?’
'And, I rather think, snails.’
'Oh, yes, sir. “The year’s at the Spring, the day’s at the morn, morning’s at seven, the hill-side’s dew-pearled —”’
'But the larks, Jeeves? The snails? I’m pretty sure larks and snails entered into it.’
'I am coming to the larks and snails, sir. “The lark’s on the wing, the snail’s on the thorn —”’
'Now you’re talking. And the tab line?’
‘“God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.”’
The same poem, Robert Browning’s ‘Pippa Passes,’ features a rather delightful error: “Besides the oft-quoted line “God’s in his Heaven/All’s right with the world!” above, the poem contains an error rooted in Robert Browning’s unfamiliarity with vulgar slang. Right at the end of the poem, in her closing song, Pippa calls out the following:
But at night, brother Howlet, far over the woods,
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats’ sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!“Twat“ both then and now is vulgar slang for a woman’s external genitals. It has become a relatively mild epithet in parts of the UK, but vulgar elsewhere. When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary enquired decades later where Browning had picked up the word, he directed them to a rhyme from 1660 that went thus: “They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s Hat/They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat.” Browning apparently missed the vulgar joke and took “twat” to mean part of a nun’s habit, pairing it in his poem with a priest’s cowl.[2][3] The mistake was pointed out by H. W. Fay in 1888.”
Goodness, I hope Jeeves explained that very clearly to Bertie before he could go around quoting that poem in mixed company. (just as well he probably only knows the lines he’s heard from Jeeves)
(via tinsnip)
