- Pippa Passes
"Pippa Passes" was a dramatic piece, as much play as
poetry , byRobert Browning published in1841 as the first volume of his "Bells and Pomegranates" series.The author described the work as "the first of a series of dramatic pieces". His original idea was of a young, innocent girl, moving unblemished through the crime-ridden neighbourhoods of
Asolo . The work caused outrage when it was first published, due to the matter-of-fact portrayals of many of the area's more disreputable characters – notably the adulterous Ottima – and for its frankness on sexual matters. Perhaps the most famous passage is below::The year's at the spring,
:And day's at the morn;
:Morning's at seven;
:The hill-side's dew-pearled;
:The lark's on the wing;
:The snail's on the thorn;
:God's in his Heaven -
:All's right with the world!Besides the oft-quoted line "God's in his Heaven/All's right with the world!" above, the poem contains an amusing 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. [ [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/twat twat - Definitions from Dictionary.com ] ] When the editors of theOxford English Dictionary inquired 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. [ [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001814.html Language Log: More on Browning, Pippa and all ] ] [Shipley, Joseph, "The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots", p. 50]The town of
Pippa Passes, Kentucky is named for Browning's poem.References and external links
* [http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/B/BrowningRobert/play/pippapasses/index.html Text of the poem]
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