Hafid B: Hello Siri Vane,
'goblet', it might be a diminuitive of gob: 'a lump, clot of some slimy
substance' (OED). Something, perhaps, like pear-shaped droplets(!) of light?
Jerry F: A goblet is a
glass with a stem, so the primary meaning of the goblets in Ada, Part 1, Ch. 8
(thanks to Ada Online), is that they appear to hold light as if it were
wine. I don't know whether any of the meanings of "gob" is
relevant.
Carolyn K: I think the word may have been
"gobbets."
Yannicke C: Hello Siri
Vane, there is also a "whorelet" in Ada.
JM: ...and there is a
"flowerlet" in PF.
PS: After gobbling James J.'s
fluent washerwomen and VN's petaled laundry
maid, tilleuil metamorphosing into GMH's elm in a dappled game of
light and shade (VN often chose "dapple" and mentions Hopkins
once in Lolita*), I realized I'd forgotten TSEliot's Burnt Norton (Four
Quartets):
"...So we moved, and they, in a formal
pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the
drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was
filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly,
quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind
us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was
empty..."
(and I don't know what lines about
Iris' "goblets of light" I love the most.)
......................................................................................................................................................
*- Dappled is a perfectly ordinary word, but it's a constant
presence in GM Hopkins and, particularly, in "Pied Beauty" ( "Glory be to
God for dappled things—/ For skies of couple-colour as a brinded
cow;/ For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/Fresh-firecoal
chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;/ Landscape plotted and pieced—fold,
fallow, and plough), where patterns bring up VN's own stained-glass
harlequins and quilts.
(a) Every movement she made in the dappled sun
plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body...
(b) ...had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks;
(c) two little maidens in shorts and halters came out of a sun-dappled
privy marked "Women."...legs wide apart; and wobbling, they slowly, absently,
merged with the light and shade. Lolita! Father and daughter melting into these
woods!;
(d) as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps
shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place. He was
no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the
Gustave Trapp;
(e) for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a
world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to
discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real
healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed,
deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting,
stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine
kind.