And ther he festnes the fete, and fathmes about,
And stod up in his stomak, that stank as the deuel.
So realistic is the description of the whale’s inside that Mr. Bateson thinks it likely that the poet had been listening to the stories of whalers. He also endorses the poet’s view of the horrors of the situation by quoting one writer who states that “the breath of the whale is frequently attended by such an insupportable smell as to bring on disorder of the brain.” If the whale made Jonah feel sick, however, Jonah, according to the poet, had much the same effect on the whale. In a moving two lines on the whale’s discomforts we are told:
For thet mote in his mawe made hym, I trowe,
Though hit lyttel were hym wyth, to wamel at his hert.
These two lines Mr. Bateson translates into colourless modern English: “For the mote made him—though it were little as compared with him—to feel sick,” and adds for our information that “the reader of whaling stories will recall how frequently the whale suffers from dyspepsia!”
We need not follow the poet in detail through the rest of the narrative, which is full of life-giving detail till the end. After God had commanded the whale——
That he hym sput spakly vpon spare drye,
we see Jonah washing his muddy mantle on the beach and proceeding with his message of doom to the “burgesses and bachelors” of Nineveh. The gourd under which he sleeps becomes a “wodbynde” (some kind of convolvulus): it is “hedera,” or ivy, in the Vulgate. Jonah’s delight, as he lay under it—“so glad of his gay lodge”—is amusingly described. He——
Lys loltrande ther-inne lokande to toune.