SOURCE: "Liturgical Influence in The Dream of the Rood," in PMLA, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, 1919, pp. 233-57.

In the following essay, Patch explores parallels between The Dream of the Rood and church liturgical texts "in order to gain a further knowledge of the poet's working method and to assist in reproducing a sense of the connotativeness of the poem."

Scholars have long made an earnest search for analogues to The Dream of the Rood,but the very remoteness of the parallels thus afforded so far is a unique testimony to the high degree of originality in the poem. Closer in some ways than any of them, in that it gives us a dialogue with the cross, the "Disputation between Mary and the Cross" might have been cited; but here again comparison shows that the Dream is a poem standing apart in the unusually fine quality of its inspiration and...