Weiblich τετραγραμματον

So: Notebooks 1:555. In September and October 1799 Coleridge, not long back from Germany, went off for a walking tour of the Lake District with Wordsworth. During the course of this the two of them visited Thomas Clarkson at Eusemere in Cumbria (I note without comment that ten years ago this house sold for £3 million), and there Coleridge jotted the above in his notebook.

The meaning is clear-enough, though it's a little, uh (not to clutch my pearls too tightly) surprisingly phrased. STC sees a hill shaped like half an arse (a ‘fat backside’). Reflected in the mirror-like clarity of lake this becomes a full arse, and the road running up between the two prominences resembles an ‘opening’—crossed out for being too suggestive—a ‘suture’ and finally the ‘Weiblich τετραγράμματον’. The adjective weiblich means ‘female’, and the Greek tetragrámmaton means ‘word comprised of four letters’. We don't need to know which particular word Coleridge had in mind (‘slit’? ‘cunt’?) to see what he's getting at.

What's odd here is that, although τετραγράμματον can mean any four-letter word, the Tetragrammaton refers to the four Hebrew letters יהוה‎ (in transliteration, YHWH or JHVH) used as the ineffable name of God in the Hebrew Bible, variously transliterated as Yahweh or Jehovah. Does it seem strange to you that a man as religiously devout as Coleridge would trifle with a piece of terminology so holy? Is he demeaning the holy name of God, or is he, in the privacy of his private notebook, elevating the vagina to Biblical ineffability? ‘I never saw so sweet an Image!!’ he says. Well, quite.