SELECT EARLY ENGLISH POEMS SELECT EARLY ENGLISH POEMS EDITED BY SIR ISRAEL GOLLANCZ, LITT.D., F.B.A. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON; HONORARY DIRECTOR OF THE EARLY ENGLISH TEXT SOCIETY VII CLEANNESS An Alliterative Tripartite Poem on the Deluge, the Destruction of Sodom, and the Death of Belshazzar, by the Poet of Pearl HUMPHREY MILFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: AMEN CORNER, B.C. 1921 PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BT FREDERICK HALL CLEANNESS ' DEPART YE, DEPART YE, GO YE OUT FROM THENCE, TOUCH NO UNCLEAN THING ... BE YE CLEAN, THAT BEAR THE VESSELS OF THE LORD.' Isaiah Hi. 11. PREFACE The Manuscript. A brief description of the manuscript in which Cleanness is preserved, namely Cotton Nero A. x in the British Museum, will be found in the Preface to Patience in this series. The poem follows immediately on Pearl in that manuscript, and is in the same hand, though here and there occur corrections and retracings of letters in a later I hand. do not think any of the retracings can be definitely differentiated from the handwriting of the corrector. 1 There are two illustrations to Cleanness, namely, Noah and his family (in an open boat in lieu of the Ark), and Daniel before Bel- shazzar; the latter is reproduced in this volume, together with a specimen of the text. Large initial letters of blue, flourished with red, mark the chief divisions of the poem. The Quatrain Arrangement. As was noted in the Preface to Patience, there can be no doubt that the author of these two poems planned his work on the basis of alliterative quatrains, and the manuscript indicates, by a slight mark in the left-hand margin, the beginnings of these stanzaic divisions, though in many cases these marks are now illegible. In the case of Patience, the quatrain arrange- ment of the printed text, with a break after each group of four lines, for the first time made clear the thought and movement of the poem, and the gain in its right under- standing and interpretation must be generally admitted. 1 See Textual Notes on the passages in question. ix b CLEANNESS The present poem, more than three times the length of Patience, has been hitherto considered, in spite of its recog- nized monotonous discursive and it is merits, and ; question- able whether it has ever been read in accordance with the poet's intention. It is confidently hoped that the present arrangement in quatrains may avail in respect of Cleanness as in the case of Patience. One thing is certain, that the inter- pretation of the poem from beginning to end is helped forward, and many difficulties are cleared up by the know- of 1 ledge the poet's metrical method. It is, however, noteworthy that here and there he forgot or made a mistake in the matter of his quatrain arrangement. When he dis- covered his error, he made good without any drastic revision. I have indicated, in the latter case, i. e. in 11. 1541-92 and in 2 11. 1757-92, how the error came about and was rectified. Evidently in Cleanness the poet was still imperfect in this effective device for giving to continuous alliterative verse something of the character of stanzaic poetry. In Patience he showed his skill wellnigh to perfection. The poet's division into three main sections is carefully indicated by the scribe, and in the present text I have followed these divisions, save in respect of the Prologue, which in the MS. is not made a section by itself. The three sectional divisions are indicated by larger capital letters than those of 1 It is an amazing fact that, in spite of my discovery of this key to the reading of these poems, Dr. K. J. Menner has not only printed Cleanness without the quatrain division, but has not seen the value of the poet's method for the punctuation and sense of the poem. As regards his view that 'the poem can certainly not be said to be written in four-line stanzas the reader can for himself. ', judge For example, Dr. Menner, in that 'no definite saying arrangement can be traced' in 11. 1529 ff., shows that he has not seen how the poetj having made an error, corrected it ; cp. my arrangement of 11. 1541-92. 2 Erkenioald and The Sege of Jerusalem are both constructed on this quatrain system. X PKEFACE the subsections the first letter of is an ; thus, the poem elaborate eight-lined letter, the first letter of Section II is an elaborate four-lined letter, and Section III, after a flourish 1 marking the end of the previous section, is preceded by a blank line, the first letter extending through four lines as well as the blank space above them. All the subsections are introduced by less elaborate letters extending through three lines. 1 The scribe's divisions seem to me to be those of the poet, in spite of their varying lengths. Links of the Poem with the other Poems. From the point of view of workmanship, Cleanness and Patience may well be described as companion poems. Although an analysis of vocabulary shows many words peculiar to the one poem or the other, yet these differences are due to the variety of the themes treated in the two poems. The general diction, dialect, method of treatment, feeling, and thought link the poems closely together, though Patience, from the artistic standpoint, could hardly have preceded Cleanness? The parallel passages in the two poems are striking. The Deluge in the present poem should be compared with the the text storm in Patience. The Sixth Beatitude (11. 25-8), of the whole poem of Cleanness, is recalled in the paraphrase of the first last the Beatitudes in Patience (11. 9-44), and serving as the text of the poem. Similarly the paraphrases 1 Dr. Menner does not recognize the tripartite division indicated in the MS., and states that the poem is divided by a large illuminated letter into thirteen irregular sections. Further, he subdivides the eleventh, twelfth, ' and last sections, and notes that there is no apparent reason why there should be a division at 345, 485, or 689 '. But 1. 345 marks the beginning of Gen. vii, 1. 485 marks the episode of the Flood having subsided, and 1. 689 introduces the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. As regards the third main division of the poem, the first section is really introductory to the second, which deals with the story of Belshazzar, and is a poetical paraphrase of Daniel v. 1 See also Preface to Patience. xi CLEANNESS from Psalm xciii. 8, 9, Cleanness, 5816, Patience, 121-4, are 1 noteworthy. It has With Pearl, Cleanness has many points in common. ' ' direct reference to the margerye perle as a symbol of purity more than it is almost a on the main (1. 556), and this, homily of thought in Pearl, that none can enter the Kingdom { Heaven save he come thither harmless, true, and undefiled, ' It without spot or blemish of staining sin (Pearl, 722-6). is true that the subject is treated in Cleanness on a grander feels scale, but none the less, as one reads the poem, one of throughout the mental and spiritual qualities of the poet Pearl. Patience, with its lesson of resignation and acceptance of the Divine Will, is more closely than Cleanness associated with the main purpose of Pearl, the theme of innocence and righteousness entering naturally into the argument of the elegy. Cleanness too, with its lofty appraising of chastity, links itself with the poet's glorification of his hero Gawain, who, though he failed in truth, embodied the poet's ideal virtue of moral chastity. The pearl, in Sir Gawain as in Cleanness, is is the of even as fittingly allegorized ; Gawain pearl knights, the pearl in Cleanness symbolizes the stainless soul. Place of Composition. As for the place of composition, nothing can at present be added to the statement, made in the Preface to Patience, that all the tests of dialect, grammar, phonology, and vocabulary tend to fix the North-West Midland 1 Dr. Menner argues that because the poet in Cleanness, 25, mentions only one of the Beatitudes, ' it is easy to suppose that the reason the poet deems it unnecessary to mention the others is because he had already done so in Patience '. To which one might reply that, whereas in Cleanness he only had occasion to refer to one, in Patience he subsequently referred to the eight, because his theme was Patience and Poverty, the first and the eighth. Similarly, with reference to the psalm in question, it does not follow that because in Cleanness the poet paraphrases, while he keeps nearer to the text in Patience, therefore the latter preceded the former. xii PREFACE 1 district as the place of origin of the poems. The North Lancashire dialect seems to be the nearest modern repre- sentative of the poet's language. The marked Scandinavian elements are perhaps even more noteworthy in Cleanness than in the other poems, as may be seen from the discussion, in the Notes appended, of certain rare Scandinavian words preserved in the poem and hitherto unexplained. Similarly, as in the other poems, the Romance element is due not only to the French words which had passed into the native speech, but also to learned borrowings showing the poet's acquaintance with French literature, such works for example as the Romaunt of the Rose and Mandeville's Travels.