http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001814.html

Never Knowingly Undersolved!

In 1841, Browning published the long dramatic poem Pippa Passes, now best known for the lines “God’s in His heaven/ All’s right with the world.” Toward the end of it, he sets up a kind of Gothic scene, and writes:

Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

The second of these lines created no stir at all, presumably because the middle class had truly forgotten the word “twat” (just as it had forgotten “quaint,” so that Marvell’s pun on the two meanings in “To His Coy Mistress” has fallen flat for six or eight generations now).

A few scholars must have recognized the word, but any who did behaved like loyal subjects when the emperor wore his new clothes, and discreetly said nothing. No editor of Browning has ever expurgated the line, even when Rossetti was diligently cutting mere “womb” out of Whitman.

The first response only came forty years later when the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, collecting examples of usage, like Johnson before them, and interested to find a contemporary use of “twat,” wrote to Browning to ask in what sense he was using it. Browning is said to have written back that he used it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns, comparable to the cowls for monks he put in the same line. The editors are then supposed to have asked if he recalled where he had learned the word. Browning replied that he knew exactly. He had read widely in seventeenth-century literature in his youth, and in a broadside poem called “Vanity of Vanities”, published in 1659, he had found these lines, referring to an ambitious cleric:

They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s Hat;
They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat.

If you are sufficiently delicate and sheltered, it is possible to take the last word as meaning something like a wimple, and Browning did. A fugitive and cloistered virtue can get into difficulties that even Milton didn’t think of.

The line is thought by some to be from Vanity of Vanities: a Portrait to the Tune of the Jews Corant (a satirical ballad) by one Harry (or Sir Henry) Vane, 1660. Others, most likely right, assert that Sir Henry Vane is the subject (hence “Portrait”), and that he wouldn’t have written such disparaging things about himself (of his father and him: “The Devil no’re see such two Harry’s”).

So, an anonymous 17th-century religious-political song lyric – most plausibly – is your man.

Then owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!