Patience (poem)

Patience (Middle English: Pacience) is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the "Pearl Poet" or "Gawain-Poet", also appears, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Cleanness (all ca. 1360-1395) and may have composed St. Erkenwald. This is thought to be true because the techniques and vocabulary of regional dialect of the unknown author is that of Northwest Midlands, located between Shropshire and Lancashire.

The manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x is in the British Museum. The first published edition was in Early English Alliterative Poems in the West Midland Dialect of the fourteenth century, printed by the Early English Text Society. Of Patience, considered the slightest of the four poems, its only manifest source is the Vulgate Bible. It also resembles Latin poems by Tertullian and Bishop Marbod. There are certain mannerisms found in Patience that Pearl does not have. For instance, both homilies clearly follow the same pattern: 1. statement of theme, 2. announcement of the text from the New Testament, 3. discussion of another passage from the New Testament in elucidation of that text, 4. and elaborate paraphrase of exemplum or exempla, from the Old Testament.

A didactic, homiletic poem, “Patience” consists of 530 lines. Alliteration is used consistently throughout the poem, usually with three alliterating words per line. The very last line repeats the opening line of the poem, giving it a kind of cyclic feel. The unidentified narrator speaks in the first person throughout the work, posing as an autobiography.

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