Cleanness

The Gawain Poet · c. 1400 CE · Poem · English · Medieval

A parable about a guest thrown out of a wedding feast for the state of his clothes opens into three long accounts of divine disgust: the flood, the burning of the cities on the plain, and the hand that writes on the wall at Belshazzar's banquet. Set between them is an unusually frank defence of married love as the opposite of defilement rather than a milder form of it. The most miscellaneous of the four poems in Cotton Nero A.x, and the one that reads its sources most literally.

Open Cleanness in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Lineage

• retells ↑ Genesis
  Anonymous · c. 550 BCE · Scripture
• companion to ↑ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  The Gawain Poet · c. 1390 CE · Poem

Attributes

Closest analogues

• The Faerie Queene
  Edmund Spenser · 1590 CE · Poem

  60% · 11 shared
  PoemAllegoryFaith & DoubtGood vs EvilTemptationVillain / TyrantEpisodicAllegoryAllegoricalMythicEnglish
• Children of Gebelawi
  Naguib Mahfouz · 1959 CE · Novel

  57% · 10 shared
  AllegoryFaith & DoubtGood vs EvilRuler / KingVillain / TyrantEpisodicAllegoryvs Fate / Godsvs SocietyAllegorical
• Genesis
  Anonymous · c. 550 BCE · Scripture

  57% · 9 shared
  AllegoryFaith & DoubtGood vs EvilTemptationEpisodicFireThe Stormvs Fate / GodsMythic
• The Book of Urizen
  William Blake · 1794 CE · Poem

  54% · 11 shared
  PoemAllegoryFaith & DoubtGood vs EvilVillain / TyrantAllegoryFirevs Fate / GodsAllegoricalMythicEnglish
• The Last Battle
  C. S. Lewis · 1956 CE · Novel

  51% · 9 shared
  AllegoryFaith & DoubtGood vs EvilRuler / KingVillain / TyrantAllegoryAllegoricalMythicEnglish
• Ti-Jean and His Brothers
  Derek Walcott · 1958 CE · Play

  48% · 8 shared
  AllegoryGood vs EvilTemptationVillain / TyrantAllegoryFireAllegoricalMythic