WTF moments in literature (2): Cleanness and Patience

The anonymous fourteenth century author of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both inexhaustible pleasures, also wrote poems on unattractive Christian virtues. In Cleanness, an alliterative sort-of-sermon, he portrays God as an obsessive-compulsive mysophobe whom filthy people drive into fits. He's also a tad autistic: order soothes and comforts Him. (I swear, this stuff is actually in the poem.)

Patience tells a different story: God the zen master. It's a homily piece, in which the author revives the familiar example of Jonah, who tried to obstruct God's plan and, when that didn't work, elude His scrutiny. In a supreme demonstration of impatience, God hurls Jonah into the belly of the great fish, from which the poor bastard emerges days later, fried and dehydrated, and persuaded never again to trespass against God. There the poem pretty much ends. Its creator never quite explains, to my satisfaction, at least, what Jonah's second-guessing has to do with being patient. As I understand it, the moral of Jonah's book is do your job and don't ask questions, not relax, brother. But maybe that's part of the mystery.

As you can probably guess, Patience and Cleanness don't touch you deep down in your fuzzy places; they don't move people, and they're not intended to. In fact, they are, if you'll pardon the pun, godawfully glacial and arid. How these prudish literary spankings were dreamed by the same brain that contrived the most elegant numerical architecture in the Pearl and the most fantastical allegory of decapitation and kissing in Gawain, I'll never fathom.

But, lest we underestimate his WTF prestige, we must remember that our anonymous poet stands unique among English versifiers as the only talent brazen enough to call God a recreant and a hippie.