DMLBS hymen: “a skyn that the chylde is lappyd in in the moder wame.” Membrane, caul. LL < ὑμήν.
DMLBS hymenaeus: wedding-song; nuptials; Hymen, god of weddings. CL < ὑμέναιος. Aldhelm: “vetitos regalia tori hymeneos” — glossed gyfta, hœmeda.
Two headwords. They were never one word.
Hamilton’s bride calls for the bed, the sheets, the door unbarred — the whole apparatus of hymenaeus — and then the body that arrives is a corpse in a shroud. The poem knows what the lexicon separates. That “expected husband lover” dissolves into a specter “bathed in slaughter” precisely at the threshold, exactly where the two headwords would have to touch if they were going to. They don’t. The door opens onto the wrong word.
The Braes of Yarrow, st. 14. William Hamilton of Bangour, 1729.