Pearl is a strikingly personal and original poem in a very old-fashioned genre, the somnium or “dream-vision.” It opens with the poet-narrator’s distress over the loss of a precious pearl, soon revealed to be his young daughter after he falls asleep on her grassy gravemound:
Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere;
Þurȝ gresse to grounde hit fro me yot.
I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere
of þat pryuy perle wythouten spot
[Alas, I lost her in a garden;
it went from me through the grass into the ground.
I waste away, terribly wounded by grief for love
of that spotless pearl of mine]. (lines 9-12, p. 33)
Thus ends the opening stanza, as translated literally by Turville-Petre for first-time readers, intimating the speaker’s metaphorical situation, which will clarify itself in the course of his dream. The poet plays poignantly on spot, repeated as the last word of the next four stanzas as well. This is a trick he employs throughout the poem through twenty movements of five stanzas apiece, each haltingly unfolding the progress of the dreamer’s vision. The pearl’s pure spotlessness recalls the fair complexion and lucent beauty of the speaker’s baby girl, of course, but also provokes him to exclaim in the second stanza, “To þenke hir color so clad in clot! [To think her colour so clothed in mud!] (line 22, p. 33). In fact, as Turville-Petre points out in his Introduction (p. 14), the dreamer’s once pristine pearl is now not only besmirched in earth, it is lost to him forever and so “withouten spot” in a second sense. She is nowhere for him now--or so he thinks.
The poem was composed toward the end of the fourteenth century in the Northwest Midlands dialect of Middle English somewhere not too far from the border of Wales. It is the first of four related poems in London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x, surviving only in this one extant text and followed byCleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, each copied out by the same scribe around 1400, the year of Geoffrey Chaucer’s death in the cloister of Westminster Abbey. Like its companions, Pearl is full of Nordicisms from the Vikings who settled nearby some centuries earlier, a very different kind of English from that used by the poet’s more cosmopolitan contemporary, working only a couple of hundred miles away in London and Kent. Yet, Pearlreveals the same imaginative energy and artistic refinement as other Ricardian poems of the same period, such as William Langland’s expansive Vision of Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, even as Pearl’s general effect is almost the exact opposite of these crowded, social, and sometimes cacophonous urban poems, especially the Canterbury Tales with that work’s kaleidoscopic panoply of talkative and empowered pilgrims. Pearl, on the other hand, is an intimate conversation between just two speakers, a father and his daughter, but one full of similar conversational verve, emotional tension, and symbolic suggestiveness. It is an exquisite Fabergé egg of a poem, minutely crafted down to its innermost parts with the smallest inflections of prosodic detail and semantic nuance. Its 101 stanzas are each composed in twelve alliterative lines of rhymed iambic tetrameter--three quatrains rhyming ABAB ABAB BCBC. As noted above, these are clustered in twenty sections of five stanzas apiece, except for the fifteenth which contains six stanzas. This anomalous extra stanza, slipped in three-fourths of the way through the poem, silently enables its perfectly imperfect total of 1212 lines in 101 stanzas, a round number in its own way. Father and daughter have reversed roles by this point: she has become the grownup in their relationship. The dad’s importunity has been “shut down” by the glowing beauty, calm intelligence, and confident authority of the Pearl Maiden on the other bank of a river flowing swiftly between them, the River of Death. He suddenly stops his querulous interrogation: the penny drops. He realizes that his grief and pining are actually a kind of thwarted greed--all about him, rather than her--and thus a subtly pernicious form of possessiveness and self-indulgence, wounded pride in his lost ownership of such a precious gem. He is the one who is soiled and spotted: “I am bot mokke and mul among [I’m just a mix of dung and dust]” (line 905, p. 162). Whereas she has become, he realizes, a beautiful rose sprung from earthly soil, tweaking his metaphor. His pearl was actually a seed sown in the ground and now her lost life has flourished into an even higher form of living as a bride of Christ, the Prince of Heaven. He has not been such a good and loving father after all, and this sudden self-awareness becomes the turning point in the poem, the beginning of his own upward journey to health and healing. He now will ask his girl simply for a glimpse of her new home in heaven.
Nearly every one of the 101 stanzas is linked to the next by the repetition of its last word in the first line of the following stanza, including the very last word of the poem: pay “pleasure, satisfaction, delight” (line 1212, p. 206), which thereby chimes back to its opening verse as well. Pearl is thus delicately coiled around itself with a fine verbal filigree threaded through all its parts. It ends precisely in the same spot where it began, but also in a very different emotional and cognitive place after its spiritual journey. As with many dream-visions, the poem is a kind of elegy, detailing the experience of loss through an erratic series of psychic surges and relapses, not dissimilar to those explored by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying [1969]): denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The Pearl poet examines all of these swirling thoughts and feelings, and more, as the dreamer stumbles upstream in his conversation with his daughter. Like other elegies, the poem imagines the process of grieving to therapeutic effect: it is meant to promote healing, imagined metaphorically as the polishing of a pearl. Not only does the dreamer finally come to observe the spiritual joy of his Pearl Maiden as one of the 144,000 virgins singing around the throne of grace in the Book of Revelation 14:1-5, but also his own raw turmoil has been smoothed into a calmer wholeness and aspiration.
The poet’s identity is unknown. He conceivably composed his poem at the behest of a patron or out of sympathy for another’s loss, like Geoffrey Chaucer for John of Gaunt in The Book of the Duchess (after 1368). Yet, as Turville-Petre notes, “it would take a broad-minded patron to welcome the uncomplimentary portrait of himself as the dreamer. If Pearl does describe an actual event, it seems more likely to be the death of the poet’s own daughter, with the dreamer as a wry self-portrait, like Geoffrey in Chaucer’s dream-vision poems and Silvius in Boccaccio’s Olympia” (1). In any case, the Pearl poet had deep imaginative resources to draw on: the Old and New Testaments, especially the Song of Songs, the parables of Jesus and the Book of Revelation; Boethius’sConsolation of Philosophy; the Old French Roman de la Rose and perhaps Dante and Boccaccio as well, though the circulation of these “modern” Italian authors in the back of beyond in Britain is less certain. The poet also knew the oral alliterative tradition in the English language, much of it elegiac in form and tone, a poetic heritage stretching back to Beowulf, the Dream of the Rood and beyond. Turville-Petre’s full but succinct and cautious commentary suggests many possible literary precedents or instructive parallels. Yet, from these multiple resources of inspiration the Pearl poet created a kind of poem never seen before or imitated afterwards, one utterly sui generis. Pearl is both new-fangled and old-fashioned, stylish and parochial, even sometimes rather countrified in its colloquial bumptiousness and the familiarity of its imagined relationship between a father and his girl who has moved on.
This new critical edition is designed to replace E. V. Gordon’s Oxford Clarendon edition of 1953, adding a useful prose translation at the bottom of each page as a trot for students, along with an up-front introduction to each set of five stanzas and a following commentary on each. Editorial emendations to the Cotton Nero manuscript are indicated between text and translation. However, there are no marginal or foot-of-page glosses of individual words and phrases, or technical Notes and Glossary in the back, so that many lovers of the old Gordon Pearl, like this reviewer, will miss that scholar’s exact and informative linguistic information with etymologies, including further Appendices on meter, orthography, phonology, Scandinavian and French loan-words, and a succinct grammar of the Northwest Midlands dialect. The Glossary will be especially missed as readers seek to parse individual lines and work out for themselves the particular resonance of the poet’s rare word choices. Gordon’s Glossary greatly enhanced the utility of his edition, but of course that very contribution is part of what has made for such a fine result in this edition and translation as well. Turville-Petre has long studied and digested the fruits of Gordon’s learned philology, especially his knowledge of Norse and Old French forms, as well as seven subsequent decades of scholarship on the poem. Many complexities of interpretation are discussed in the introduction and commentaries, rather than line by line, and contemporary readers can now turn quickly to the online Middle English Dictionary (MED) as well (updated 2018). So, with the easy availability of this lexicographical aid and perhaps Gordon’s text to one side for reference, Turville-Petre’s Pearl can indeed serve as the new go-to edition for serious study of the poem. Much of the pleasure and excitement of readingPearl, for this reader at least, comes from stumbling over its hard words and unusual turns of phrase, turning for help to the experts and finding even more of its richness and strangeness in the process of that discovery.