Pippa Passes

Pippa Passes was a dramatic piece, as much play as poetry, by Robert Browning published in 1841 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. When the editors of the Oxford 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.

The town of Pippa Passes, Kentucky is named for Browning's poem.

References and external links

• Text of the poem