Symbolic and Narrative Patterns in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Gawain

Abstract

SYMBOLIC AND NARRATIVE PATTERNS IN PEARL, CLEANNESS, PATIENCE, AND GAWAIN A. KENT HIEATT University of Western Ontario T h e growth in our comprehension of the four poems of m s Cotton Nero a . x has generally resulted from close study of one or another of them as an individual creation, or from recognition in one or another of them of features which are most completely intelligible as items in much more extensive bodies of medieval literary, iconographical, homiletic, or other traditions. Our pro­ gress has resulted, in other words, from examining each of these works as an individual phenomenon or as a constituent in much larger, generically or historically determined wholes. Yet there is clearly another fruitful way of proceeding, lying between these two, according to which the author's works are studied as an oeuvre, or a whole in themselves, for the light which they may shed on each other and on their creator. The four poems of this manuscript (leaving aside the question of St Erkenwald) have only rarely been systematically examined in this w ay.1 An examination of this kind may be conducted so as to demonstrate a number of significantly similar motifs, images, narrative patterns, and key words and concepts which increase our appreciation of the real concerns of Pearl and particularly of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The simple moral polarity of Cleanness, for example, which is embodied in a symbolic opposition between, on the one side, filthy, worn, torn clothes and perishable objects and, on the other, clean, gay clothes and flawless beryls, pearls, and containers, is replaced by a more intricate pattern in Pearl, largely because of the contrast in that poem between the dreamer's and Christ's attitudes towards the physical and spiritual embodiments of these things; yet this new pattern remains in the same seman­ tic and symbolic area as the one in Patience. Similarly the "endless" pearl which plays so important a part in Pearl relates significantly to the equally important "endless" pentangle of Gawain. Correspondingly the seductive woodbine of Jonah's second, sly testing in Patience relates to the equally seductive green lace, or girdle, of Gawain's equally sly Second Test; and the narrative strategy of which unexpected second tests are a corollary is equally characteristic of the two poems. There is not as great a distance between the true preoccupations of any one of these poems and the others as has previously been supposed. It is useful to start by developing interpretations and common features for discussion within the framework of summaries of Cleanness and Patience. En g lish Stud ies in Ca n ad a, ii, 2, Summer 1976 126 English Studies in Canada Since the elements of both these works will be seen here mostly in relation to how they reappear in Pearl and Gawain, and not in terms of the poet's biblical and other sources, it has seemed advisable to compose these summaries from the standpoint of a creator who is visualizing the total narrative and symbolic material at his command, without much distinction between what his imagina­ tion has borrowed and what it seems to have independently generated. From the rather different point of view of a separate study of Patience, for example, it would be important to notice that Jonah's explanation to God of why he had not wanted in the first place to go to Nineveh is the same as in the biblical account, but that in the poem this explanation has been turned into a transparent rationalization by adding at an earlier point a specific version of Jonah's original, quite different motive. For present purposes, however, we are not as interested in how the poet has changed the story as we are in telling the story as such, in terms of its narrative and symbolic realia, as these must have been held in the mind of the creator of all four poems. Patience2 Of the eight beatitudes, the speaker is dowered with the first, which is Poverty, and would therefore be prudent to acquire the last, which is Patience. Whatever his lord commands - even a disagreeably long journey - might as well be undertaken...