'The Chestnut Holds Her Gluey Knops Upthrust'

Some words look like typos. Phlegm is one. Similarly, apothegm. Both appear to be missing vowels, and I always double-check the spelling. In the second stanza of “January” (1894) by Robert Bridges I found another faux-typo:  

 

“The trees their mournful branches lift aloft:

The oak with knotty twigs is full of trust,

With bud-thronged stems the cherry in the croft;

The chestnut holds her gluey knops upthrust.”

 

Knops? Could be a levidrome* (a word spelling another word in reverse order). Almost a publisher. And “gluey knops upthrust” sounds a little salacious. The OED – a wet blanket, as usual – offers a more prosaic definition, and cites Bridges’ usage: “the bud of a flower; a compact or rounded flower-head or seed-vessel.” That usage dates from late-fourteenth-century Middle English. Earlier it meant “a small rounded protuberance, a knob (esp. one of an ornamental character, e.g. upon the stem of a chalice, a candlestick, etc.); a boss, stud, button, tassel.”

 

It’s one of those wonderful English words that has metastasized over the centuries. It came to mean an ornamental loop or tuft of yarn, a folk name for red clover, the protuberance formed by the front of the knee or elbow, and a wart or pimple. No wonder English poetry once flourished. Bridges served as the literary executor for his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins who used a variant spelling of the word in the journal he was keeping in 1871: “Then the knot or ‘knoop’ of buds some shut, some just gaping.”

 

*SPONK is an acronym for spontaneous osteonecrosis of the knee.