Whatever one may think of the other two Cotton Nero poems, Cleanness and Patience must surely be the work of one hand. They both start by announcing the particular virtue with which they will be concerned, citing from the Beatitudes Christ's promised reward for that virtue. Both go on to illustrate their theme with Old Testament stories, chosen to contrast the cleanness or patience of God with the corresponding vices among men – Jonah, in the case of Patience. In both poems, too, the choice of stories and their application to the theme show a similar mind at work, a mind ingenious and independent in its concern, not with allegorical interpretations, but with the varieties of literal moral example to be derived from the old stories.

One does not need to invoke anthropology to explain Patience. For modern readers its moral theme is less difficult than that of Cleanness. Yet the idea of patience evidently meant more to Ricardian poets than it does today. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, patience is spoken of as a ‘heigh vertu’ and a ‘greet vertu of perfeccioun’ (V, 773; VII, 1517), and it is exemplified by the Clerk's story of patient Griselda – a tale which, the Clerk says, teaches us to receive the adversities that God sends in ‘vertuous suffraunce’ (IV, 1162). In a central episode of Langland's Piers Plowman, again, the hero is a personified Patience, teachingWill to control his exasperation at the hypocrisy of an egregious friar – that virtue being the traditional remedy against such rebellious and angry impulses. Such ‘vertuous suffraunce’ turns out also to be the best policy, for patientes vincunt, patient people end up victorious (as Griselda did). Langland's Patience quotes this prudential Latin maxim several times; yet he is also a charismatic figure, representing patience as a lofty ascetic ideal. So Langland shows the virtue at its fullest extension, claiming for it both spiritual excellence and practical efficacy.

The choice of the story of Jonah and the whale to illustrate the theme of patience is unusual (the standard example was Job). Perhaps the poet's attention was caught by the Book of Jonah's description of God as ‘patiens et multae miserationis’ (‘patient and of much compassion’, Jonah 4: 2).