'Fettled in on forme': reading Patience as a ‘poetic imitation’

Abstract

This study offers a critical analysis of the Medieval poem Patience and its relation to the Vulgate Bible's version of The Book of Jonah. The poet's translation method is seen as being much closer to the Eighteenth-Century idea of 'poetic imitation', rather than 'paraphrase'. The article is in two sections, the first of which offers a detailed appraisal of the Latin text of the Vulgate, with the focus being on the system of parallelism which characterises the Biblical style; the second section explores the poet's response to this structural system and relates his significant transformation of the source to the poem's 'homiletic' theme. The critical method is that of close textual reading.

KEYWORDS: Imitation; Patience poem; Middle English; Translation