‘As holy wryt telles’? Reading Patience as a Poetic Imitation

This study offers a critical analysis of the medieval poem Patience and its relation to the Book of Jonah as found in the Vulgate Bible. The translation is argued to be much closer to the eighteenth-century poet’s idea of imitation rather than paraphrase. A first section offers a detailed appraisal of the Latin text of the Vulgate, the focus being on the system of parallelism which characterizes the biblical style. A second 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 adopted is that of close reading.