Patience is one of four major narrative poems preserved in a single manuscript (British Museum
Cotton Nero A.x ) by the late 14th-century author
known as the “Gawain poet” or the “Pearl poet.”
Like the other poems in the manuscript (SIR
GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, PEARL, and CLEANNESS), Patience is written in a northern West Midland dialect. It is structured in stanzas of four
alliterative lines—like all of the poems of the
Gawain poet, Patience is part of the ALLITERATIVE
REVIVAL of the later 14th century.
Patience is a MIDDLE ENGLISH verse retelling, in
531 lines, of the Old Testament story of Jonah. It
begins with a 60-line passage extolling the virtue of
patience, and then offers Jonah’s story as an illustration of human impatience contrasted with the
patience of God. The poet’s conception of patience
is far more complex and varied than a modern
reader is likely to suspect. In a vivid and detailed
narrative, the poet considers patience as endurance
of misfortune, but also as self-control in all circumstances—essentially it is obedience to truth or
to ultimate reality, to the will of God.
The Jonah story follows the chronology of the
biblical narrative, though the poet adds a good
deal of concrete detail. The belly of the whale,
which the poet compares with hell, is so slimy that
Jonah must stumble about, looking for a clean
nook to lodge in while praying to God for three
days. After the whale has spit him up on dry land,
the poet mentions how badly his clothes need
washing. When God spares the city of Nineveh
after Jonah’s preaching, the prophet is angry and
blames God for his “courtesy”—a word with profound significance for all of the poems in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript. Courtesy is behavior in
accordance with charity: By the end of the poem
God’s courtesy includes his mercy and patience
that preserves human beings in the world.
In effect the poem is organized like a medieval
sermon, specifically a sermon on the eighth beatitude (“Blessed are they which are persecuted for
righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven,” Mt. 5.10), to which the poet alludes in the
prologue. Thus like a sermon, it begins with a statement of the theme followed by an illustration of the
theme with a detailed exemplum (not unlike The
PARDONER’S TALE by the Gawain poet’s contemporary Geoffrey CHAUCER). The author’s source was, of
course, chiefly the book of Jonah in the Vulgate
Bible, but he may also have known a hymn on Jonah
by the late Latin poet PRUDENTIUS, as well as another
Latin poem, De Jona et Ninive, attributed to the
early Christian theologian Tertullian. Still the depiction of Jonah in Patience owes little to any earlier
source. None of the traditional exegetic interpretations of the Jonah story (Jonah as an allegorical type
of Christ, for instance) occur in the poem, and the
poet is unique in applying the notion of patience to
Jonah ’s story. Also unusual is the poet’s playing up
the comic aspects of Jonah and his encounters with
God. It is certainly one of the most entertaining and
effective scriptural paraphrases in medieval English,
and is more tightly crafted than the Gawain poet’s
most similar poem, Cleanness.
Bibliography
Bowers, R. H. The Legend of Jonah. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971.
Brewer, Derek, and Jonathan Gibson, ed. A Companion to the Gawain-poet. Woodbridge, U.K.: D. S.
Brewer, 1997.
The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. Translated with
an introduction by Casey Finch; Middle English
texts edited by Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron,
and Clifford Peterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Gardner, John, trans. The Complete Works of the
Gawain-poet. Woodcuts by Fritz Kredel. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Schleusner, Jay. “History and Action in Patience,”
PMLA 86 (1971): 959–965.
Williams, David J. “The Point of Patience,” Modern
Philology 68 (1970–71): 127–136.