So what was her 'velvet glass'--?

[bellatrys]

Revisiting and visiting John Donne's verse brought more than one not usually anthologized to my awareness, but the most stunning to date, I think, would have to be his second Elegy, aka "The Anagram", which starts in something of the vein of a more Xtreme "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"* and rapidly goes downhill - or somewhere, into

Comments

"velvet" however modifies "glass" in that line

[bellatrys]

it isn't a freestanding noun, and the pattern is [known object], [known object], [___] where the joke seems to be that even inanimate objects will resist like an unwilling slaveboy, so if "veluet glasse" is really supposed to mean "maidservant's tongue" it breaks up the pattern very badly by introducing another hypothetical character to the narrative, and I don't see any way to get around the fact that "glass" has the commonest meaning of either the vitreous substance, or as an abbreviation of looking glass, in English lit, I'm not coming up with any examples of it being commonly used as a euphemism for anything sexual (I'm not even sure, altho' I know now that glass dildos are not the innovation I thought they were, that they were common enough formerly that the word "glass" would itself have the connotative effect on the typical reader, in such a context, as "rabbit" or "pearl" do nowdays.) I don't have ready access to the OED at this point, it's a major hassle to get to the library for me now, but I'm afraid that later uses of "velvet" are overwriting/overriding the past, but even if the substitution is the same, I don't see how you can get from "cunny glass" to lesbian makeout session unless there is some very obscure 17th c slang in which "glass" = "tongue"...

Re: "velvet" however modifies "glass" in that line

[fledgist]

There's no entry for 'velvet glass' in the OED. It's the first place I looked.

It might mean 'maidservant's cunny' rather than tongue, though.

any 17th-c examples of "glass" where "glass" = vulva?

[bellatrys]

That *could* work, if "glass" is taken to mean "vessel", but against that is the problem that while today, our first usual definition of "glass" is drinking ware, that wasn't the case in the 16th century where various metals, wood, and leather were far more common than glass, or even pottery, to the best of my experience. (NB: according to this article, there were a number of technical and economic factors making glass an imported and/or expensive rarity in England until the latter half of the 1600s.)

I almost wonder if this wasn't some kind of inside joke in their circle, him referencing some story someone had about so-and-so's girlfriend getting herself off with [her mirror]/[pastinaca muranese][whatever it was] that they would all recognize but wouldn't necessarily be comprehensible to outsiders any more than any other injoke, even at the time.

Re: any 17th-c examples of "glass" where "glass" = vulva?

[fledgist]

A fair, indeed good pair of points.

It might, indeed be an in-joke.

"The glass of fashion, and the mould of form"

[deiseach]

I was thinking of it in that context, where Ophelia calls Hamlet "the glass of fashion"; literally, glass = mirror, but metaphorically, it's the shadow, reflection, image or twin.

So "her velvet glass" could be "her image, her twin, a woman as ugly as she" wouldn't even touch her.

But yeah, it's pushing the idea out to the limits. Very probably the literal meaning - velvet glass = small hand mirror decorated or covered with velvet.

(Now we have to wonder if there were jokes about mistresses and maids and what they got up to in the bedchamber together, and if JD could be riffing off that - like that verse by Catullus to the bridegroom, where he says 'now you're married, your favourite serving-boy will have to stop sharing your pillow' or the like):

"Let not the merry Fescennine
jesting be silent,
let the favourite boy give away nuts to the slaves
when he hears how his lord
has left his love.
Give nuts to the slaves,
favourite: your time is past,
you have played with nuts long enough:
you must now be the servant of Talassius.
Give nuts, beloved slave.
Today and yesterday
you disdained the country wives,
now the barber shaves
your cheeks. Wretched, ah! wretched
lover, throw the nuts!
They will say that you,
perfumed bridegroom, are unwilling .
to give up your old pleasures; but abstain
Io Hymen Hymenaeus io,
io Hymen Hymenaeus!
We know that you are acquainted
with no unlawful joys: but a husband
has not the same liberty."