Cleanness

I sometimes wonder why a lot of people treat medieval poems as structurally inferior, as if the structure just isn't there. I suppose part of it might be that a lot of it has a paratactic structure, a term that is often bandied about by my mentors and other scholars as a prime structure of oral literatures. Short, simple sentences are combined with simple conjunctions, with a larger structure that might appear to be a list of events.

Perhaps in justification, to preserve the idea that many of these works are far more enriched than the generalization might imply (since "simple" too often becomes the one-word prescription for it, when one is being generous and not using the collocation "bad"), I like searching for deeper structures, or alternately finding deep ambiguities even at the surface, to use an opposition that implies that there is a depth to explore. (Deleuze is on my mind.) This is why I play with puns often, or revert to close reading to make a point. I'm very good with these methods. It's making the large, grand claim where I could use some development.

I say these two paragraphs because my first reaction on finishing this is that it was tough to see the structure. Maybe this was due to the language. I have been reading middle english for a while now, but sometimes alliterative poetry just defeats me. I understood the bulk of it, but a few passages, and several shorter units were very difficult to make out. I chose to read on rather than spend a significant amount of time consulting different dictionaries. My edition has a helpful glossary, but there were a few times when my curiosity would have taken it way further than that.

The poem has what I would call four main parts.
1. Introduction and the Feast Parable
2. Noah
3. Abraham and Lot
4. Babylon

The basic message, to condense it in a trite sentence, is: "God likes cleanliness of body and spirit, and abhors anyone who allows themselves to become impure." Homilies are easy like that.

There are some tentative connections between this poem and the others. For example, between the third and the fourth part, the transition features a pearl, which stands for the purity and salvation that the poem is trying to communicate, and may draw on the prior poem Pearl for much of its power. The form is similar to the later poems, being an alliterative verse with four beats per line. There is no stanza form here. I can't comment much more until I've read Patience, but I expect the two to be similar.

A few things that interested me:
So much about Cleanness relies on having proper sexual relationships. Note that sex is not dismissed outright - it is proper with one's wife, in private (esp. 697-708). God taught it to people. In contrast, the men in Sodom insist on having the two angels come out, in a passage that is rather more gruesome than the Bible, if I recall correctly. Cleanness also concerns itself a lot with pride, especially in the last story, but it is interesting that the two biggest sins here seem to be that and lechery.

The word (yogh)yender as a variant to yonder. I found it quite interesting when used because it looked at first like it could be a corruption of gender, a word already in use at the time in the Latinate sense of genus, generis. The passage is at line 1617; reading it again, it clearly makes sense with yonder, a delightful misunderstanding would give this modernization: "And though the matter is murky that is marked gender..." Har. Doesn't make as much sense.

The reason it doesn't seem to at first hold together well, at least for me, is the event in the beginning, the dinner party. That combined with the emphasis on one's appearance strikes me, someone who has always learned that what's on the inside matters far more than what's on the outside, strange. I think part of the emphasis comes from class structure (oh, of course it does). The entire poem is preoccupied with the relationship between lords and servants. The word wyg(yogh) recurs many times, as do others, sometimes for Lot's servants (890s) and sometimes for the servants of the queen of Babylon (1587), just to give a few examples. If one dresses appropriately for one's position, and one's worth is reflected in the quality and station of the clothing available to her, then appearing slovenly before a lord when one could dress better is a strike against her. Then again, does this mean that peasants are worth less morally because they are unable to dress up? Perhaps the causation isn't there, but the general point remains - one unable to afford such clothes would be morally suspect as compared to the honor of a lord. So what does this poem say about those relations, and how does the emphasis on lord and servant translate here when the preoccupation with clothing is so important? What's the likely theological message? How does it converse with other theologians, whether Thomas Aquinas or Julian of Norwich?