Beautiful Filth: Cleanness’s Sensually Appealing Sins and the
Dirtiness of the Incarnation
Cleanness begins with a seemingly straightforward distinction—clean things are beautiful and filthy things are not. If we could trust the poet’s logic, we would safely be able to assume that an object must be clean if it appeals to our senses through its “fayre formez.” The poem’s first biblical allusion, the parable of the wedding feast, seems to continue this argument by proposing that ugly things do not have a place in the kingdom of heaven, but those that are “frely and fresch fonde” and “fetyse of a fayr forme” are acceptable in God’s sight. The poem’s succeeding exempla each present to the reader sensually enticing descriptions that stand out from the text’s emphasis on filth and destruction through the detailed precision of the poet’s language; however, the beauty of these things is realized as damnably dangerous—as the very snare that leads to the sinners’ destruction in the poem. The poet’s sensual appeals to the readers are, in fact, acts of violence: the shining glory of Lucifer, the fair faces of the antediluvian races, the sway of the beardless angels’ hips as they enter Sodom, and the intricately detailed description of the Solomonic vessels at Belshazzar’s feast each appeal to the readers’ senses, and we, too, want to touch, to smell, to taste, to know, the delights that such forbidden fruits possess behind their shining exteriors. We become sympathetically entangled with the most damnable figures in Biblical history, and we must repeatedly experience the horrific ugliness of God’s wrath, directed toward our newfound acquaintances. The poet has seductively violated us by forcing us to confront our own filthy desires.
God’s own cleanness is not very pretty, and only by recognizing the offensiveness of the filth of his incarnation (born in the rottenness [rote] of a stable) can we begin to understand the complexities of filth and beauty. Only by following the circumlocutionary logic of beautiful filth (or filthy beauty) can we begin to discover how to play safely with the sensually appealing things of the world, like a lover’s body or the Roman de la Rose. Cleanness’s own form, the messiness of which continues to challenge scholars, resists the sterile, idolizing fetishizations found within its exempla and demands a closer, more fruitful analysis on its proper use.
