Robert Browning’s Bad Habit

This chapter examines a rather embarrassing error in the closing section of Robert Browning's Pippa Passes (1841), where he casually uses a slang word for female genitalia when meaning to refer to part of a nun's clothing. Like Wordsworth, Browning comes by his mistake honestly, having drawn his definition for the word from his memory of it in a seventeenth-century satirical ballad. Browning's error turns out to be a case of misreading: his source poem actually uses the word correctly—but Browning misses the joke. By exploring his mistake in context, the chapter raises the question of how interpretive mistakes relate to broader questions of meaning and its duplicity, not least in poems that are dramatic. Browning's mistake in reading thus serves as a proxy for the kinds of misinterpretations to which all readers of poetry are susceptible, especially when treating mistakes like his.