Study guide

Pearl

by Anonymous (the 'Pearl' or 'Gawain' poet)

Overview

Composed: Late fourteenth century, probably in its last quarter; the unique manuscript was copied around 1400
Manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x (Art. 3), the only copy, where Pearl comes first, followed by Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Language: Middle English of the North-West Midlands, usually placed in the region of Cheshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire
Genre: Dream vision, elegy and theological debate
Form: Twelve-line stanzas rhyming ababababbcbc, in four-stress lines with heavy alliteration; stanzas linked by concatenation (a word from the last line repeated in the first line of the next)
Length and structure: 1,212 lines in 101 stanzas, grouped in twenty sections of five stanzas, except section XV, which has six; the last line echoes the first
Setting: A garden (erber) in August; in the dream, a jewelled landscape divided by a river, beyond which lies the New Jerusalem
Speakers: The Dreamer, a grieving father who calls himself a jeweller, and the Pearl-Maiden, his child, now a queen in heaven
Main sources: The Bible, especially Matthew 13 and 20 and Revelation 14 and 21–22; the tradition of the dream vision and of Boethian consolation
On this site: Sophie Jewett's verse translation (1908), in the metre and stanza of the original, quoted here; and the Middle English text (ed. Morris, EETS 1864, 2nd ed. 1869). References give the line numbers of the original, which Jewett follows stanza by stanza

Context

Pearl survives in a single manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x, a small, plainly written book of about 1400 that also contains Cleanness (sometimes called Purity), Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The four poems are untitled; the names are modern. The manuscript also contains a set of crude coloured illustrations, several of which show scenes from Pearl: the dreamer asleep in the garden, the dreamer by the river, the maiden on the farther bank, and the city. The manuscript was owned in the early seventeenth century by Henry Savile of Banke and then passed into the library of Sir Robert Cotton, whence it came to the British Museum (Andrew 2007).

The author is unknown. Because of shared dialect, vocabulary, style and moral concerns, most scholars think that one poet wrote all four poems of the manuscript, and he is called the Pearl-poet or the Gawain-poet; the alliterative legend Saint Erkenwald has sometimes been attributed to him too, on weaker grounds. Attempts to name him, for instance as John Massey of Cotton in Cheshire, have not won general acceptance. His language is that of the North-West Midlands, and his learning, in Scripture, theology and courtly culture, suggests a cleric or a well-educated layman attached to a great household (Putter 1996) (Brewer 1997).

Pearl is the most elaborately constructed poem in Middle English. Its 101 stanzas each have twelve lines on three rhymes, combining the rhyme of French and Italian lyric with the alliteration of English verse; each stanza ends with a refrain, and the key word of the refrain is picked up in the first line of the next stanza, a device known as concatenation. The stanzas are grouped in twenty sections of five, each with its own link word, and the last line of the poem returns to the first. The total of 1,212 lines and the prominence of the number twelve, the number of the heavenly city in Revelation, have prompted much study of the poem's numerical design (Condren 2002).

The poem belongs to the tradition of the dream vision, which runs from Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and the Roman de la Rose to Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, also an elegy, and Langland's Piers Plowman. Like Boethius, the dreamer is taught by a figure of authority to accept his loss; like Dante's Beatrice, his teacher is a woman he loved on earth, now in glory. Israel Gollancz printed Boccaccio's Latin eclogue Olympia, an elegy for a young daughter who appears to her father in a vision, with his edition, as a parallel (Gollancz 1921); whether the poet knew it is uncertain.

Pearl was first edited by Richard Morris for the Early English Text Society in 1864 (Morris 1869). Gollancz's edition of 1891, with a translation, established the reading of the poem as a personal elegy, and Sophie Jewett's translation of 1908, made in the metre of the original, brought it to a wider audience (Jewett 1908). The edition by E. V. Gordon (1953) and the collected edition of the manuscript by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron are standard; J. R. R. Tolkien, who worked on Gordon's edition, also published a verse translation (Gordon 1953) (Andrew 2007) (Tolkien 1975). Sarah Stanbury's annotated edition is a convenient student text (Stanbury 2001).

Plot overview

A man who has lost a precious pearl in a garden returns to the spot in August and falls asleep on the mound where it lies. In a dream he finds himself in a landscape of crystal cliffs and jewelled trees, beside a river with gems in its bed. On the farther side he sees a maiden in white, dressed in pearls, and recognises her: she was nearer to him than aunt or niece, and she died before she was two years old.

The dreamer greets her as his lost pearl and calls himself a joyless jeweller. She rebukes him: his pearl is not lost but kept safe, and he is wrong to believe only his eyes, to think he can stay with her, and to think he can cross the river. When she tells him that the Lamb has made her his bride and a queen in heaven, he protests that this crown belongs to Mary alone and that a child who never learned to pray cannot deserve such honour. She answers with the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, in which all receive the same wage, and with the doctrine of grace: the baptised innocent is saved as surely as the righteous, and the kingdom of heaven is the pearl of great price.

She explains that she is one of the hundred and forty-four thousand brides of the Lamb, and that they dwell not in the earthly Jerusalem but in the New Jerusalem. At her request the Lamb allows the dreamer to see the city from outside. He sees it as Saint John describes it in Revelation, with its twelve foundations of precious stones, its gates of pearl, and its river flowing from the throne, and then a procession of virgins led by the Lamb, whose side still bears a bleeding wound.

Seeing his 'little queen' among them, the dreamer tries to cross the river, and the effort wakes him. He finds himself on the mound in the garden. Though grieved to have lost the vision, he accepts that his pearl is safe, admits that his longing for more cost him further sight, and commits her to God in a closing prayer that we may be servants of the God shown daily in the Eucharist, and precious pearls to his pleasure.

Canto by canto

Canto 1: The Lost Pearl

1–60

Summary

The speaker praises a pearl fit for a prince's pleasure, round, radiant and small, which he has lost in a garden: it slipped from him through the grass into the ground. Ever since, he has returned to the spot in grief. He imagines the earth that holds it marring its beauty, yet the mound is covered with flowers and spices, and he reflects that the grain must die in the ground before the wheat can grow.

One August day, at harvest time, he enters the arbour again and stands over the mound where the pearl fell, overgrown with gillyflower, ginger, gromwell and peonies. Reason and the comfort of Christ argue with his grief, but his will is lost in sorrow. Overcome by the scent of the herbs, he falls asleep on the grave.

Analysis

The first canto keeps up the fiction of a jeweller who has lost a gem, but the language of loss (the earth that 'stains' the pearl, the clay, the mound) is the language of burial, and readers have almost always taken the pearl as a dead child. The poem is careful not to say so yet. Its first word, and its last, is the pearl; its first line ends on the prince's 'paye' (pleasure), a word the final canto will recover, so that the whole poem closes into a circle.

The canto also sets out the poem's method. Every stanza ends with a refrain on the word 'spot', and each new stanza picks the word up in its first line; this linking, called concatenation, binds the five stanzas of each section and then each section to the next. The harvest image of seed dying into new growth (John 12:24; 1 Corinthians 15:36–37) is the first hint of the consolation the dream will offer, though the speaker, whose 'will' is lost in 'wretchedness', is not yet able to accept it.

Perle plesaunte to prynces paye, To clanly clos in golde so clere,

Pearl 1–2 (Middle English)

The opening in the original. 'Paye' (pleasure) returns in the last canto's refrain and in the last line of the poem, which echoes this one.

Alas! I lost my pearl of old! I pine with heart-pain unforgot; Down through my arbour grass it rolled, My own pearl, precious, without spot.

Pearl 9–12

The first refrain. 'Without spot' means both flawless and, as the next stanza plays on it, separated from the 'spot' where it was lost; the pun on the place and the stain runs through the canto.

The blade grows where the grain lies dead, Else were no ripe wheat stored away;

Pearl 31–32

A biblical image of resurrection, set in the August harvest. The speaker states it as a proverb, without yet feeling its force.

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Canto 2: The Dream Landscape

61–120

Summary

His spirit leaves his sleeping body and finds itself, by God's grace, in a land of marvels: crystal cliffs, woods with trunks blue as indigo and leaves like burnished silver, gravel that seems to be pearls of the Orient. Brilliant birds sing more sweetly than any stringed instrument, and the beauty of the place makes him forget his grief.

He wanders on until he reaches a river whose banks shine like beryl. Its bed is set with stones that glow through the water like stars on a winter night, emeralds and sapphires, so that the whole stream gleams.

Analysis

The dream landscape belongs to the tradition of the earthly paradise and of the dream vision, from the Roman de la Rose to Chaucer, but here nature is made of jewels: it is a landscape in the mineral language of Revelation, glimpsed before the poem names it. The refrain word in the original is 'adubbement', adornment (Jewett's 'beauties blent'), a word for dressing and arming that stresses artifice over growth. The dreamer's joy is aesthetic and sensory; he forgets his sorrow without understanding it.

The movement is from the garden of decay in Canto I to a garden where nothing withers. Critics have noted that the dreamer's descriptions are precise in what he sees and silent on what it means, a pattern that will continue until the maiden begins to interpret (Stanbury 1991).

From the spot my spirit springs into space, The while my body sleeping lies;

Pearl 61–62

The concatenating word 'spot' carries the transition from the grave to the vision: the dream begins from the place of loss.

The gravel on the ground below Seemed precious pearls of Orient;

Pearl 81–82

In this country pearls are as common as gravel, the first sign that the dreamer's scale of value will be overturned.

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Canto 3: The River and the Maiden

121–180

Summary

The beauty of the valley turns his grief to joy, and the joy grows the further he follows the stream. He reflects that Fortune always leaves a man wanting more. He is sure that Paradise lies on the farther bank and that a city stands somewhere beyond, but he can find no ford, and the dangers seem to grow as he walks.

Then he sees, at the foot of a crystal cliff on the other side, a maiden dressed in shining white. He knows her; he has seen her before. The longer he looks, the better he knows her, and her face, smooth as ivory as it used to be, fills him with joy and fear at once.

Analysis

The refrain 'more and more' defines the dreamer's state: desire that increases without satisfaction. The poem already marks this as a problem, through the reflection on Fortune, and it will return at the very end, when the dreamer admits that a man 'will seek more than is sent'.

The river is the poem's central boundary. It separates the dreamer's side, beautiful as it is, from the true Paradise, and it will divide him from the maiden for the rest of the poem. The recognition is withheld: the dreamer knows her but does not yet say who she is, and the poem lets the reader share his sense of a familiar face in a strange place.

For Paradise, the very place, Must be upon that farther side; The water by a narrow space Pleasance from pleasance did divide.

Pearl 137–140

The river separates one delight from another. The narrowness of the stream makes the separation feel crossable, which is exactly the dreamer's mistake.

And I know her,--have seen her otherwhere.

Pearl 164

Recognition without a name. The tact is characteristic: the poem never names the maiden or states plainly how she was related to the dreamer.

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Canto 4: The Maiden in Pearls

181–240

Summary

Afraid that she is a spirit and will vanish, the dreamer stands silent and still. The maiden rises and comes down the bank towards him, dressed royally in white linen trimmed with pearls, wearing a crown of pearls and no other stone, her hair loose and golden. In the centre of her breast is a single flawless pearl of wonderful size.

She was nearer to him, he says, than aunt or niece, and his joy is the greater for it. She bows to him, takes off her crown, and greets him, and he blesses the hour he was born.

Analysis

The canto is an extended portrait in the manner of courtly description, from the robe down to the hems and up to the crown, but its single colour is white and its single jewel the pearl. The great pearl on her breast will later be identified as the pearl of great price, the kingdom of heaven itself (Canto XIII). Her courtly manners, the bow and the greeting, introduce the word that will matter most in Canto VIII: courtesy.

'Nearer kin than aunt or niece' is the closest the poem comes to stating a relationship. Together with the statement in Canto IX that she lived 'not two years', it is the main evidence for the reading of the poem as an elegy for the poet's daughter, the view of most modern editors since Gollancz (Gollancz 1921) (Gordon 1953).

I stood as quiet as hawk in hall.

Pearl 184

A falconer's image: the hooded hawk in a hall keeps perfectly still. The dreamer's world remains that of an aristocratic household.

She was nearer kin than aunt or niece, And thus my joy was much the more.

Pearl 233–234

The original reads 'Ho watȝ me nerre þen aunte or nece'. The phrasing implies a closer tie without naming it; most readers take it to mean a daughter.

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Canto 5: The Joyless Jeweller

241–300

Summary

The dreamer asks whether she is the pearl he has mourned, alone at night, since she slipped from him into the grass. She lives a life of delight while he is left in strife: since they were torn apart, he has been a 'joyless jeweller'.

She replies, gravely, that he tells his tale wrongly. His pearl is not lost but kept in this garden as a jewel is kept in a coffer; what he lost was only a rose that bloomed and faded by nature, and it has become a pearl of price. He calls a thief the fate that has given him something for nothing. The dreamer, delighted, says he will now live with her in these woods and love God for this bliss. She answers that he has made three thoughtless statements: that she is here because he sees her with his eyes; that he will live with her in this country; and that he may cross the water.

Analysis

Here the debate begins. The dreamer's grief, which the reader has shared, is now judged, and judged by the person he mourns. The figure of the jeweller defines his error: he values the pearl as a possession. Her images of the rose that fades and the pearl that lasts set nature against grace, and her accusation that he blames 'his sorrow's remedy' reverses his account of what has happened.

The three errors are errors of perception (trusting his eyes), of presumption (assuming he can stay) and of time (forgetting that he must die first). They set the programme for the rest of the poem. Critics differ over how far the maiden's severity is a sign of heavenly detachment and how far it is a teacher's method; David Aers reads the dialogue as a study of the self in mourning that the maiden's doctrine cannot simply cancel (Aers 1993).

Fro we in twynne wern towen & twayned, I haf ben a Ioyleȝ Iuelere.

Pearl 251–252 (Middle English)

The original of the dreamer's lament, with its heavy alliteration on t and its refrain word 'jeweller'.

Thou hast lost nothing save a rose That flowered and failed by life's decree:

Pearl 269–270

The maiden's first lesson: the earthly child was a perishable flower; what endures is the pearl she has become.

A thief thou hast dubbed thy destiny That something for nothing gives thee, sir;

Pearl 273–274

She inverts his complaint. Fate has not robbed him; it has given him more than he gave.

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Canto 6: Judgement and Submission

301–360

Summary

The maiden continues: a jeweller who believes only what he sees deserves little praise, and it is pride to doubt Christ's promise of resurrection until one has seen it with one's own eyes. He cannot cross the water while alive. Since Adam's fall every man must lie in the womb of death before God judges him on this bank.

The dreamer protests: is he to find his pearl and lose her again? What is treasure for but tears? She answers that for grief at losing the lesser, men lose the greater. Anger brings no happiness; he must bend his pride, for however he struggles he must at last endure God's judgement. Let him cease complaining and seek God's mercy.

Analysis

The refrain word is 'deme', to judge (Jewett's 'doom'), and the canto turns on the question of who judges whom. The dreamer has been judging God's dealings with him; the maiden insists that judgement belongs to God alone. The argument mixes Boethian consolation, which teaches acceptance of fortune, with Christian teaching on death and resurrection; the 'womb of death' turns the grave into the place of a second birth.

Many readers find the maiden hard here, and the poem seems to expect that response: the dreamer's question, what is treasure but tears, is given full force before it is answered. The balance between consolation and rebuke is one of the main grounds of debate about the poem's tone (Spearing 1970).

The jeweler merits little praise, Who loves but what he sees with eye,

Pearl 301–302

The first of the dreamer's three errors: trusting only sight. The poem as a whole is a vision that must be interpreted.

For pain of parting with the less, Man often lets the greater go.

Pearl 339–340

The canto's central maxim: excessive grief for the earthly loss can cost the eternal gain.

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Canto 7: Bride of the Lamb

361–420

Summary

The dreamer begs her not to be angry: his rash words came from sorrow. She has been his bliss and his bale, and he now asks her to tell him plainly what life she leads. She welcomes his humbler speech, warning him that pride is hateful here, and explains that although she died very young, the Lamb took her as his bride and crowned her a queen in bliss for ever.

Analysis

The refrain word is 'bliss', and the dreamer's speech shows a first change: he moves from protest to request, and asks about her happiness rather than his loss. The revelation that the child is a queen and the bride of the Lamb draws on the marriage imagery of Revelation 19 and 21 and on the tradition, rooted in the Song of Songs, of the soul as the bride of Christ.

The canto also introduces the Lamb, who will dominate the second half of the poem. The maiden calls him 'my Lord the Lamb'; the gentleness of the title, set against the dreamer's earlier pride, prepares the meekness that the maiden praises in him later.

Grief and my soul thou hast made express One music,--thou who wert my bliss.

Pearl 371–372

The dreamer admits that she has been both the cause of his grief and the object of his love.

But my Lord the Lamb, as if to show His grace, took me His bride to be,

Pearl 413–414

The revelation of her status. The emphasis on grace prepares the debate on merit that follows.

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Canto 8: The Queen of Courtesy

421–480

Summary

The dreamer is shocked. Is she the queen of heaven? Surely that crown belongs to Mary alone, the Phoenix of Araby, the Queen of Courtesy. The maiden kneels in praise of Mary and explains that Mary's place is not threatened: in the court of heaven every one who enters is a king or queen, and no one deprives another, but each rejoices in the others' honour.

She cites Saint Paul: all Christians are members of Christ's body, as head, arms and legs belong to one body, and no limb envies another. The dreamer is not satisfied. She has risen too high too young: what more could a man win who lived in penance all his life?

Analysis

The refrain word is 'courtesy', a central value in this poet's work. In the courtly sense it means generosity and fine manners; here it becomes a name for grace, the free and unenvious giving that orders heaven. The 'Phoenix of Araby', a bird unique in its kind, was a common image of Mary's singularity.

The image of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12) answers the dreamer's hierarchical thinking, in which honour is limited and one person's gain is another's loss. The dreamer's objection, that the child has done nothing to deserve her crown, is a natural one, and it sets up the theological centre of the poem.

We call her the Phoenix of Araby,

Pearl 430

The phoenix, single and self-renewing, was a standard emblem of Mary as unique among women and of the resurrection.

Each one who therein may arrive, Of the realm is either queen or king;

Pearl 447–448

Heaven as a court in which honour is shared, not divided.

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Canto 9: The Parable of the Vineyard

481–540

Summary

The dreamer presses his objection: she lived not two years among us, never learned to please God or to pray, knew neither the Paternoster nor the Creed, and was made a queen on the first day. A countess, or a lady of lower rank, he could accept, but a queen is too high.

She answers that with God there is no soon or late, and tells the parable of the labourers in the vineyard from the Gospel of Matthew (20:1–16). A lord hires workers at dawn for a penny a day, then goes back to the market place at intervals through the day and hires more, until an hour before sunset he finds men idle and sends them too into the vineyard.

Analysis

The dreamer's objection is the one any reasonable reader might make: reward should follow merit. His categories, countess and lady, are those of earthly rank. The refrain word in the original is 'date', which means both a point in time and a limit or term; the maiden's answer, that there is no 'date' to God's goodness, plays on both senses.

The poet's choice of parable is deliberate. The parable of the vineyard was usually read in the Middle Ages as an allegory of the ages of the world or the stages of a human life, and its point, that the master pays all alike, suited a soul that came to the vineyard at the very end of the day. The retelling is close to the Gospel, but expanded with detail of the working day (Kean 1967).

Our life not two years didst thou lead Nor learned to please God, nor to pray,

Pearl 483–484

The poem's only statement of the child's age. The original reads 'Þou lyfed not two ȝer in oure þede'.

With Him there is no soon nor late,

Pearl 493

The maiden's answer, which moves the argument from time and merit to eternity and grace.

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Canto 10: The Last and the First

541–600

Summary

At evening the lord tells his steward to pay the workers, starting with the last. All receive the same penny. Those who came first complain that they bore the heat of the day; the lord answers that he has done them no wrong, since they agreed to a penny, and that he may do as he wishes with his own. The last shall be first and the first last, for many are called but few chosen.

The maiden applies the parable to herself: she came to the vineyard at nightfall and was paid in full. The dreamer replies that her tale is unreasonable and quotes the Psalter: God rewards each according to his deeds. If she was paid first, then the less receives the more.

Analysis

The canto states both sides of the debate as sharply as possible. The maiden's case rests on the parable; the dreamer's on a psalm (Psalm 62:12 in the Authorised Version, 61:13 in the Vulgate). The refrain word 'more' returns from Canto III, and it now has a theological meaning: the dreamer thinks of reward as a quantity that can be more or less.

Whether the maiden's teaching is strictly orthodox has been debated. It stresses grace over merit, and some scholars connect it with fourteenth-century arguments about salvation; others see in it a standard account of the baptised innocent. Nicholas Watson reads the poem as a work of vernacular theology, willing to argue doctrine in English for lay readers (Watson 1997).

The last shall be the first of you; And the first last, however swift, For many are called, but chosen, few.

Pearl 570–572

The close of the parable (Matthew 20:16), spoken by Christ through the maiden's retelling.

Most wage falls to least labouring, And ever the less receives the more.

Pearl 599–600

The dreamer's objection in its strongest form. The refrain 'more' turns the argument into a question of measurement.

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Canto 11: The Grace of God Is Great Enough

601–660

Summary

The maiden answers that in God's kingdom there is no more or less: all are paid alike, for God is no miser and his gifts flow like water from a moat. Every adult sins and forfeits heaven at some point, so that even the holiest depend on mercy. But the baptised infant who dies before committing sin has done God's will and carries his sign.

She recounts the fall: mankind was made for bliss, but Adam lost it for an apple. Christ found the remedy on the cross; the blood and water that flowed from his side redeem us from hell and wash away original sin in baptism. Nothing now bars mankind from the bliss God intended.

Analysis

The refrain is 'the grace of God is great enough', and the canto's argument depends on the word 'enough'. Grace is not a wage measured against work but a gift sufficient for all. The maiden's argument is now explicitly sacramental: baptism, through the water from Christ's side (John 19:34), makes the infant innocent and so worthy.

The doctrine here is mainstream. The baptised infant's salvation was not in question in the medieval Church; what is unusual is the claim that such a soul is crowned a queen, equal in reward to any. The maiden's reply turns the dreamer's moral arithmetic upside down: on his reckoning, the adult who has sinned and repented has a weaker claim than the innocent.

For þe grace of god is gret I-noghe.

Pearl 612 (Middle English)

The refrain line in the original. 'I-noghe' (enough) carries the sense of abundance, not mere sufficiency.

Our forefather that boon resigned, All for an apple's sake, I wis;

Pearl 639–640

The fall in a single couplet, plainly told, before the redemption that answers it.

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Canto 12: The Innocent and the Righteous

661–720

Summary

The maiden distinguishes two kinds of the saved. The sinner who repents may find pardon, but only with sorrow and penance; the innocent who never sinned is saved without condition. She quotes the Psalter on who may ascend the hill of the Lord, the one whose hands and heart are clean, and the Book of Wisdom on the righteous man who is shown the kingdom.

She cites David's prayer that God not enter into judgement with his servant, since no living man is justified, and urges the dreamer to pray to be saved, when he is tried, not as righteous but as innocent. Finally she recalls Christ blessing the children whom the disciples tried to keep from him: the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

Analysis

The refrain is 'innocent', and the canto works like a little sermon, with a chain of texts from the Psalms (Psalms 24 and 143 in the Authorised Version), the Book of Wisdom (10:10) and the Gospels (Mark 10:13–16). The argument shifts from the child's case to the dreamer's own: his hope too must rest on mercy, not merit.

This is an important turn. Until now the debate has been about whether she deserves her crown; now the maiden reminds him that he will also be judged, and that no one is justified by works. Her teaching becomes a consolation for him as well as a defence of herself.

The sinful soul of mercy fain Finds pardon if he will repent, But he who sinless doth remain Is surely saved, being innocent.

Pearl 669–672

The canto's two categories: the penitent sinner and the innocent.

Saved, not as righteous, but innocent.

Pearl 708

The maiden's prayer for the dreamer, in which innocence is not a quality earned but one restored by grace.

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Canto 13: The Pearl of Great Price

721–780

Summary

Christ, the maiden continues, said that no one may enter his kingdom except as a child, without spot of sin. That kingdom is the pearl for which the merchant sold all he had (Matthew 13:45–46). It is flawless and round, and it is common to all the righteous; the Lamb has set it on her breast as a token of his blood shed for peace. She urges the dreamer to forsake the mad world and buy this pearl.

The dreamer asks who made her beauty, beyond the skill of Pygmalion or the eloquence of Aristotle, and what her pearl means. She explains that the Lamb chose her as his bride, washed her robes in his blood and clothed her in spotless pearls. The dreamer asks whether she alone is his wife, and so above all the women who suffered for Christ.

Analysis

The canto turns on two words in the original, 'maskelles' (spotless) and 'makelles' (matchless), which differ by a single letter. The maiden accepts the first and, in the next canto, refuses the second: she is spotless, but not peerless, since others share her state. The pun is a model of the poem's way of thinking through words.

The parable of the merchant identifies the pearl on her breast with the kingdom of heaven, and the poem's central symbol now holds several meanings at once: the lost child, the soul in grace, the kingdom, and the reward that is the same for all. The image of the pearl's roundness, without beginning or end, suits the eternity it stands for and the poem's circular form (Robertson 1950).

To barter all stuffs men weave and spin, To buy him a pearl unblemished.

Pearl 731–732

The merchant of the parable. The refrain word 'unblemished' renders the original's 'maskelles'.

It is a flawless, perfect sphere, Polished and pure, and bright and brave;

Pearl 737–738

The pearl as the kingdom of heaven: perfect, round and common to all.

Passeth Pygmalion's artifice;

Pearl 750

The dreamer's praise uses the learned language of art and nature: neither Pygmalion's art (he 'paynted' her face, the original says) nor Aristotle's learning could match her.

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Canto 14: The Lamb of Jerusalem

781–840

Summary

She is spotless, the maiden replies, but she never claimed to be the peerless queen. She is one of the hundred and forty-four thousand brides of the Lamb whom Saint John saw on Mount Zion in the Apocalypse, gathered for the wedding in the New Jerusalem.

She describes the Lamb: Isaiah prophesied him as a sheep led to the slaughter; he was condemned in Jerusalem, mocked and crucified, though without sin; John the Baptist greeted him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world; and the apostle John saw him in the Revelation, opening the book with seven seals before the throne.

Analysis

The refrain word is 'Jerusalem', and the canto moves the poem from the vineyard of the parables to the city of the Apocalypse. The maiden assembles the three appearances of Christ as Lamb in Scripture: Isaiah 53:7, John 1:29 and Revelation 5. The Lamb who is slain is also the bridegroom and the judge.

The hundred and forty-four thousand of Revelation 14:1–5 are virgins who follow the Lamb. The number, twelve times twelve thousand, is the first of the poem's explicit numbers of perfection. Her answer also corrects the dreamer's picture of heaven as a hierarchy: she is one of a multitude, each a queen.

But 'peerless Queen' I did not say. Brides of the Lamb in bliss we reign, An hundred and forty thousand gay,

Pearl 784–786

She accepts 'spotless' and refuses 'peerless': the distinction between 'maskelles' and 'makelles' in the original.

As a sheep to the slaughter led was He;

Pearl 801

Isaiah 53:7, the first of three scriptural appearances of the Lamb.

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Canto 15: The Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand

841–912

Summary

The Lamb, the maiden says, has no stain; he welcomes every sinless soul, and though new souls arrive each day, there is no strife for room. The more the merrier: love grows in company, and no one's honour is lessened. Though their bodies lie in the clay and their friends mourn them, the blessed know joy, and at every mass the Lamb renews their happiness.

She quotes John's vision of the Lamb on Mount Zion with the hundred and forty-four thousand, the sound like many waters and thunder, the new song that only the redeemed can sing. The dreamer, calling himself dung and dust before her radiant rose, asks one more question.

Analysis

This is the section with six stanzas instead of five, which brings the poem's total to 101 and its length to 1212 lines. Whether the extra stanza is an authorial design or a slip has been argued. Many scholars think it deliberate, noting that Sir Gawain also has 101 stanzas and that 1212 echoes the twelves of the heavenly city (Condren 2002); others have suspected that one stanza of this section was meant to be cancelled.

The refrain word is 'less' ('never the less'), and the canto returns to the economy of the parable: in heaven, honour is not a fixed sum to be shared but a good that increases when shared. The reference to the mass anticipates the eucharistic ending.

The more the merrier, I profess. In company our love grows bright, In honour more and never less.

Pearl 850–852

A proverb in the mouth of a soul in bliss. The original has 'þe mo þe myryer'; heavenly joy multiplies with company.

Behold, I am but dung and dust, And thou a rare and radiant rose,

Pearl 905–906

The dreamer's new humility, and the return of the rose, now an image of glory rather than transience.

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Canto 16: The Two Jerusalems

913–972

Summary

The dreamer asks where the maiden and her companions live. She speaks of Jerusalem, the city of David, but that is in Palestine; surely so spotless a company must have a fine city, yet he sees no buildings here. Does she live alone in the woods?

She explains that there are two Jerusalems. The old city in Judea was where the Lamb suffered and our peace was made; the name means 'vision of peace'. The new, which came down from God, is where peace has no end, and where souls go when the body dies. The dreamer asks to see it. She replies that he is too weak to enter, but that she has obtained from the Lamb the gift of seeing it from outside.

Analysis

The refrain word is 'mote', which means both a spot or stain and a walled city or castle (Jewett's 'flaw'). The pun connects the poem's ethics of purity with its architecture: the spotless city needs no moat. The dreamer's literalism, his thought that the city must be in Palestine, is corrected by a distinction between the historical and the heavenly Jerusalem, a common pattern of medieval biblical interpretation.

The maiden's grant of a sight from outside marks the limit of what the dreamer can have. He may see but not enter, a restriction that his final attempt to cross the river will violate.

Not flawless the city in Juda's land,

Pearl 937

The earthly Jerusalem, where the Lamb suffered, is distinguished from the heavenly one.

To step in that street thou hast no power, Unless thy soul were free from flaw.

Pearl 971–972

The terms of the vision: to see, not to enter.

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Canto 17: The City Seen

973–1032

Summary

The maiden tells him to walk upstream towards the source of the river while she follows on the other bank. From a hill he sees the city, brighter than the sun, as John describes it in the Revelation. It is of gold like clear glass, set on twelve foundations of precious stones, and the dreamer names them in order as John does: jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, ruby, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth and amethyst.

Above the foundations the wall is of jasper; the streets are of gold like glass; the city is square, and its length, breadth and height are equal, twelve furlongs each, as John says he saw it measured.

Analysis

The refrain line ends on 'John', and the canto follows Revelation 21:10–21 closely, sometimes stone by stone. The dreamer, who began by describing a landscape he could not understand, now describes a city whose meaning is fixed by Scripture. The poet's word is that of a witness who checks his own vision against an authoritative text.

The cube of the city, the twelve foundations and the twelve furlongs make the number twelve the structural principle of heaven. The poem itself is built in stanzas of twelve lines, and its length of 1212 lines has been read as an echo of this architecture (Condren 2002).

The city all of gold burned bright, Like gleaming glass that glistens clear.

Pearl 989–990

Revelation 21:18. The impossible material, gold that is transparent, shows a reality beyond earthly substances.

In height, length, breadth appeared four-square;

Pearl 1024

The cube city of Revelation 21:16, an image of perfection.

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Canto 18: The Light of the City

1033–1092

Summary

There are three gates in each wall, twelve in all, each a single pearl, with the names of the tribes of Israel written above. The city needs neither sun nor moon, for God is its light and the Lamb its lamp. A river flows from the throne through every street; there is no church or chapel, since God is its minster and the Lamb its sacrifice. The gates stand always open, but no one stained with sin may enter.

The moon has no power there: it is too spotted and grey, and there is no night. Beside the stream grow trees that bear fruit twelve times a year. The dreamer stands as still as a startled quail, and says that no mortal could see such a sight and live.

Analysis

The canto follows Revelation 21:21–22:2. The refrain word is 'moon', and the moon, 'spotty, grey and grim', serves as an image of the changeable, imperfect created world, set against the unspotted light of the city. The gates of pearl return the poem to its central symbol: the way into the kingdom is itself a pearl.

The dreamer's response is now one of awe rather than desire; the startled quail recalls the hawk in hall of Canto IV. His claim that no man could survive such a sight recalls God's warning to Moses that no man may see his face and live (Exodus 33:20).

Each gate a single pearl saw I, A perfect pearl, as John relates.

Pearl 1037–1038

Revelation 21:21, the origin of the 'pearly gates'.

The moon may there win no least might, She is too spotty, grey and grim;

Pearl 1069–1070

The moon's 'spots' contrast with the maiden who is 'without spot'.

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Canto 19: The Procession of the Lamb

1093–1152

Summary

Suddenly, as the moon rises before daylight fades, the dreamer sees the streets of the city filled with a silent procession of virgins dressed like his beloved, each crowned with pearls and wearing the pearl of price on her breast. The Lamb leads them, with seven horns of red gold and robes like pearls, towards the throne. The elders fall at his feet, angels swing censers, and all sing his praise.

The dreamer sees in the Lamb's side a wide wound, from which blood runs down; he wonders who could have done such a thing. But the Lamb's face shows no pain, only joy. Then he sees his 'little queen' among her companions, whom he had thought beside him in the glade, and in his longing he resolves to wade the stream.

Analysis

The procession is drawn from Revelation 5 and 14, and the seven horns and the elders are John's. What is the poet's own is the wound: the Lamb in glory still bears the marks of the crucifixion, and his joy does not cancel his suffering. This is perhaps the poem's deepest image of consolation, since it shows loss taken up into glory rather than erased.

The dreamer's sight of the maiden among her peers is the climax of the vision. The refrain is 'delight', and his delight turns into the desire that will end the dream. For a moment he understands that she is one of many, and in the next he forgets it.

But a wide, wet wound my gaze descries Beneath His heart, through His skin rent;

Pearl 1135–1136

The wounded Lamb in glory: suffering is not undone in heaven but transfigured.

My little queen there moved about, I had thought beside me in the glade.

Pearl 1147–1148

The tenderness of 'little queen' joins the dreamer's earthly love to the maiden's heavenly rank.

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Canto 20: Waking

1153–1212

Summary

Overcome with love and longing, the dreamer resolves to swim the river even if he dies in the attempt. But it is not the Prince's will; as he plunges forward the movement wakes him, and he finds himself lying on the mound in the garden where his pearl was lost. He is grieved to be exiled from the vision, but he accepts the maiden's teaching: if she is truly crowned and safe, it is well with him, even in his prison.

He reflects that had he submitted to the Prince's will and desired no more than he was given, he might have seen more of God's mysteries; but men always want more than they are given. He commits his pearl to God, with Christ's blessing and his own, and ends with a prayer that we may be the servants of the God who is shown to us daily in the bread and wine of the mass, and precious pearls to his pleasure.

Analysis

The refrain word is 'paye', pleasure, and the poem ends where it began, on the 'prince's paye'. But the Prince is now God, not an earthly lord, and the pearl is not a possession but the soul of every Christian. The return to the first line closes the circle of the form while showing how much its words have changed.

The ending is both consolation and failure. The dreamer is woken by his own impatience, the old desire for 'more', yet he now knows his pearl is safe and turns his grief into prayer. The final image of the Eucharist offers a daily, sacramental vision in place of the dream. Readers disagree on how complete the consolation is; some read a full acceptance, others a grief that remains, held within submission (Aers 1993) (Spearing 1970).

As I sprang forward to the brim, The action in my dreaming made Me waken in my arbour trim.

Pearl 1169–1171

The dream ends at the boundary the dreamer was told not to cross; his own movement wakes him.

But a man will seek more than is sent, Till from his hand his hope be riven.

Pearl 1195–1196

The poem's moral of desire, recalling the 'more and more' of Canto III.

He gef vus to be his homly hyne, Ande precious perleȝ vnto his pay.

Pearl 1211–1212 (Middle English)

The last line of the original echoes the first: 'perle' and 'paye' return, now meaning the souls of the faithful and God's pleasure.

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Characters

Earth

The Dreamer: The narrator, a grieving father who calls himself a jeweller and his dead child his pearl. His grief is intense and sometimes rebellious; he argues with the maiden in the language of law, rank and reward, and must be taught to see her loss as gain. He learns slowly and incompletely, and the poem ends with his own impatience waking him from the dream. He is not a simple figure of error: many of his objections are those a reader would make, and his love is never condemned.

Heaven

The Pearl-Maiden: The dreamer's child, who died before she was two years old, now appearing as a grown maiden, a queen and a bride of the Lamb. She is the dreamer's teacher, grave, learned and at times severe, quoting Scripture and arguing theology with precision. She is never named. Her severity and her affection, and the distance between the child he lost and the queen he meets, are central to the poem's emotional effect.
The Lamb: Christ, in the image of Revelation, the bridegroom of the maiden and of all the hundred and forty-four thousand. The maiden traces his figure through Isaiah, John the Baptist and the Apocalypse. When the dreamer finally sees him, he leads the procession of the blessed with seven horns of gold and a bleeding wound in his side, yet his face is full of joy.
The Virgin Mary: Invoked by the dreamer as the Queen of Heaven, the Phoenix of Araby and the Queen of Courtesy. The maiden honours her and explains that Mary's sovereignty is not lessened by the fact that every soul in heaven is a king or queen.
The hundred and forty-four thousand: The virgins of Revelation 14 who follow the Lamb, each crowned and wearing the pearl of price. The maiden is one of them; their procession in Canto XIX shows that her queenship is shared, not unique.
The elders: The elders of Revelation 4–5 who stand about the throne with the four beasts, and fall before the Lamb as he passes.

Scripture

Saint John: The apostle, identified in the Middle Ages as the author of the Book of Revelation, whose vision of the New Jerusalem the dreamer follows almost stone by stone. The refrain of Canto XVII ends on his name. The dreamer's vision is checked against John's at every point, so that John becomes his model as a seer.

Parable

The lord of the vineyard: The householder of Matthew 20, who hires labourers throughout the day and pays them all the same penny. In the maiden's retelling he stands for God, whose generosity is not limited by human ideas of fair wages.
The labourers: The workers of the parable. Those hired first complain that the latecomers, who worked a single hour, are paid as much as they; the maiden places herself among the last, who came to the vineyard at nightfall.
The merchant: The figure of Matthew 13:45–46 who sells all he has to buy a single pearl of great price, the kingdom of heaven. He offers the dreamer a model of the right kind of jeweller.

Themes

Grief and consolation

Pearl begins in grief and ends in prayer. Between the two lies a long attempt to turn mourning into understanding, through vision, argument and Scripture. The poem takes the grief seriously: the dreamer's sorrow is given vivid expression, and the maiden's rebukes do not simply dismiss it.

The consolation offered is Christian and Boethian: the lost one is not lost but safe, the earthly loss is heavenly gain, and the right response is submission to God's will. Whether the dreamer fully accepts it is left open, and modern readers have often found the poem's power in the gap between doctrine and feeling (Aers 1993).

Grace and merit

The theological centre of the poem is the debate over whether a child who did nothing can deserve the highest reward. The dreamer argues from justice and rank; the maiden from grace, through the parable of the vineyard and the doctrine of baptism. Reward in heaven is not measured against work, and the honour of one soul is not diminished by that of another.

The poem does not deny merit, but it shows that all human claims ultimately depend on mercy. The maiden's prayer that the dreamer be saved 'not as righteous, but innocent' turns the argument from her case to his (Watson 1997).

Earthly and heavenly value

The dreamer calls himself a jeweller, and the poem measures his grief by the values of the jeweller's trade: possession, rarity, price. The maiden teaches a different economy, in which the pearl of great price is bought by giving everything up, and in which gems are as common as gravel.

The poem's lavish descriptions of jewels are not simply decorative. They show the dreamer trying to grasp heavenly reality with earthly categories, and the poem slowly converting those categories into symbols of grace.

Courtesy and the community of heaven

Courtesy, for this poet, is both a courtly virtue and a name for divine grace. Heaven is a court in which every soul is a king or queen, no one envies another, and Mary rules as Queen of Courtesy. The image of the body of Christ, in which no limb resents another, expresses the same idea.

The dreamer's difficulty is that he imagines honour as limited, as it is in an earthly court. The poem's heaven is a society in which joy increases as it is shared: 'the more the merrier'.

Seeing and understanding

The poem is a vision, and it is much concerned with the limits of sight. The dreamer's first error is to believe only what he sees; his descriptions are brilliant but uncomprehending until the maiden interprets for him. His sight of the city is granted only from outside, and his attempt to go beyond it ends the dream.

The final turn to the Eucharist, in which God is shown daily under the form of bread and wine, suggests a kind of seeing that depends on faith rather than the eyes (Stanbury 1991) (Bogdanos 1983).

Desire and submission

The dreamer's besetting fault is the desire for 'more': more joy, more sight, more possession. The refrain 'more and more' in Canto III and his admission at the end that 'a man will seek more than is sent' frame the poem. The final refrain, on the 'Prince's will', names the alternative: acceptance of what God gives.

Motifs

Concatenation and refrain

Each stanza ends on a refrain and each new stanza begins by repeating its key word; each section of five stanzas shares a link word (spot, more, jeweller, bliss, courtesy, innocent, Jerusalem, John, moon, will and so on). The device binds the poem together and makes the argument advance through the shifting senses of a single word, as when 'mote' means both a stain and a walled city.

Circularity

The poem's last line echoes its first, as Sir Gawain's does, so that the form imitates the round pearl and the eternity it signifies. The return also measures the change in meaning: the prince's pleasure at the start is an earthly lord's, at the end God's.

The number twelve

Twelve-line stanzas, a total of 1,212 lines, the hundred and forty-four thousand (twelve times twelve thousand), twelve foundations, twelve gates and twelve furlongs. The number of the heavenly city in Revelation shapes the poem's own structure (Condren 2002).

Jewels and the lapidary

From the gravel of pearls in Canto II to the twelve foundations of the city, the poem is full of precious stones. Medieval lapidaries gave each stone virtues and meanings, and the poem uses this learned tradition to make its heaven both visible and significant.

Judgement and law

The language of judging, wages, debt and contract runs through the debate: the dreamer judges God, the lord of the vineyard settles accounts, David prays not to be judged. The poem sets the logic of the law court against that of grace.

Symbols

The pearl

The poem's central symbol shifts meaning as the poem goes on: a jewel, a lost child, the maiden's purity, the soul in grace, the kingdom of heaven bought by the merchant, the gates of the city, and finally the souls of all Christians, 'pure pearls' to God's pleasure. Its roundness and flawlessness were traditional images of perfection and eternity, and the name Margaret (Latin margarita, 'pearl') has led some to suggest the child's name (Robertson 1950) (Gollancz 1921).

The river

The stream divides the dreamer from the maiden and from the city. It marks the boundary between life and death that he may not cross while alive. His attempt to swim it ends the vision.

The Lamb

Christ as the sacrificial lamb of Isaiah, the Lamb of God of John the Baptist and the Lamb of the Apocalypse. Meek and slain, he is also bridegroom and king, and his wound in glory shows suffering transfigured but not forgotten.

The New Jerusalem

The heavenly city of Revelation 21–22, golden, cubic, founded on precious stones and lit by God himself. It stands for the perfected community of the saved, the 'vision of peace' that the earthly Jerusalem only anticipated.

The garden

The erber or arbour where the pearl was lost frames the dream. It is a place of burial and harvest, of decay and growth, and its counterpart in the dream is the jewelled paradise where nothing fades.

Critical debates

Elegy or allegory?

From Gollancz onward, most readers have taken Pearl as an elegy for the poet's daughter, citing the details of her age and kinship (Gollancz 1921) (Osgood 1906). In the early twentieth century W. H. Schofield argued that the poem was rather an allegory of clean maidenhood, and others read the pearl as a symbol of the Eucharist, of the soul, or of the poet's lost innocence (Schofield 1909) (Garrett 1918).

Sister Mary Vincent Hillmann even argued that the lost pearl was a literal jewel and the dreamer a man too attached to wealth (Hillmann 1961). René Wellek's survey of the debate concluded that the poem is an elegy that uses allegory and symbol, and that view, refined by Gordon and later critics, is the consensus (Wellek 1966) (Gordon 1953). The question is now less whether the child was real than how the poem holds personal grief and symbolic meaning together.

The theology of equal reward

The maiden's claim that a baptised infant may be crowned a queen, equal in reward to any saint, has raised questions about the poem's orthodoxy. Some critics have seen it as extreme, close to denying degrees of glory in heaven, a doctrine generally taught in the period; others argue that the maiden speaks of the essential reward of salvation, shared by all, while allowing differences of degree.

The debate has been linked to fourteenth-century controversies over grace and merit. Recent scholars tend to read the poem as a confident work of lay or vernacular theology, which uses its dialogue to set out real tensions in Christian teaching rather than to settle them (Watson 1997) (Bishop 1968).

Who was the Pearl?

The poem says that the child was nearer to the dreamer than aunt or niece and lived less than two years. Most readers infer a daughter; some have suggested a younger sister or a godchild. Gollancz proposed that her name was Margaret or Marguerite, since margarita means 'pearl', but this is speculation.

Whether the poem is autobiographical at all is unknowable. Many critics therefore speak of the dreamer, not the poet, as father, and treat the bereavement as the poem's fiction, whatever its origin (Spearing 1970) (Putter 1996).

The numbers and the sixth stanza of section XV

Section XV has six stanzas instead of five, so that the poem has 101 stanzas, like Sir Gawain, and 1,212 lines. Some editors have thought one stanza should be cancelled; most now see the extra stanza as deliberate, since it produces both totals.

Numerical criticism has gone further, finding proportions and symbolic numbers throughout the manuscript; such arguments are suggestive but difficult to prove, and they vary in persuasiveness (Condren 2002) (Gordon 1953).

Is the dreamer corrected?

Older criticism tended to take the maiden as the voice of truth and the dreamer as a figure of error who is gradually instructed. Later readers have stressed that the dreamer is not wholly converted: he still wants more, he plunges into the river, and his final acceptance is mixed with sorrow.

Spearing reads the poem's power in the dramatic clash between two perspectives; Aers sees the dreamer's mourning as resisting a consolation that cannot do justice to his loss; others find in the closing prayer a real, if imperfect, change (Spearing 1970) (Aers 1993) (Kean 1967).

Common authorship and the manuscript

That one poet wrote Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain is a strong inference from dialect, vocabulary, style and themes, but it cannot be proved. The poems differ in form: Pearl rhymes and alliterates in elaborate stanzas, Cleanness and Patience are in unrhymed alliterative lines, and Sir Gawain combines alliterative lines with short rhyming 'bob and wheel'.

Read together, the four poems share a concern with purity, patience and courtesy, and with the encounter between a human being and a demanding divine order (Andrew 2007) (Brewer 1997).

Pearl and the court of Richard II

John M. Bowers has argued that Pearl should be read in the context of the court of Richard II, with its Cheshire connections and its cult of the Virgin and of jewelled display, and that the poem's heavenly court reflects the politics of royal patronage. The argument has been influential but remains conjectural, since nothing is known of the poem's patron or first audience (Bowers 2001).

Key passages

Alas! I lost my pearl of old! I pine with heart-pain unforgot; Down through my arbour grass it rolled, My own pearl, precious, without spot.

The Dreamer · Pearl 9–12

The first refrain sets out the poem's grief and its central symbol. The pearl that 'rolled' through the grass into the earth is plainly a buried child, though the poem keeps to the figure of the jewel. 'Without spot' means both flawless and lost from the 'spot' where it fell; the poem's linked refrains begin here.

Thou hast lost nothing save a rose That flowered and failed by life's decree:

The Pearl-Maiden · Pearl 269–270

The maiden's first lesson to the grieving father: the earthly life she had was a flower, mortal by nature; the pearl she has become cannot fade. The rebuke is severe, but it reframes the loss as transformation.

For pain of parting with the less, Man often lets the greater go.

The Pearl-Maiden · Pearl 339–340

A compact statement of the poem's moral argument: excessive attachment to an earthly good can cost the eternal one. The dreamer's grief, natural as it is, risks the very salvation that would reunite him with her.

Our life not two years didst thou lead Nor learned to please God, nor to pray,

The Dreamer · Pearl 483–484

The dreamer's objection gives the poem's one fact about the child's age. His protest that she never learned the Paternoster or the Creed shows his view of reward as earned, which the parable of the vineyard will answer.

The last shall be the first of you; And the first last, however swift, For many are called, but chosen, few.

The Pearl-Maiden, quoting Christ · Pearl 570–572

The close of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:16). The maiden places herself among those who came at nightfall and were paid in full, and so defends grace against the dreamer's theory of merit.

For þe grace of god is gret I-noghe.

The Pearl-Maiden · Pearl 612 (Middle English)

The refrain of section XI in the original. 'Enough' is used in the sense of abundance: God's grace is sufficient for all, and so there is no need to measure reward against labour.

The more the merrier, I profess. In company our love grows bright, In honour more and never less.

The Pearl-Maiden · Pearl 850–852

The heavenly economy expressed in a proverb. Unlike earthly honour, which is diminished by division, joy in heaven grows as it is shared. The line comes from section XV, the one section with six stanzas.

The moon may there win no least might, She is too spotty, grey and grim;

The Dreamer · Pearl 1069–1070

In the New Jerusalem the moon is too blemished to shine. The 'spots' of the changeable created world contrast with the maiden 'without spot', and the image recalls the opening refrain.

But a man will seek more than is sent, Till from his hand his hope be riven.

The Dreamer · Pearl 1195–1196

After waking, the dreamer recognises the fault that ended his vision: the desire for more than he was given. The lines recall the 'more and more' of Canto III and give the poem its final moral.

His servants may we be, or shine, Pure pearls, according to his will.

The Dreamer · Pearl 1211–1212

The closing prayer extends the image of the pearl from the lost child to all Christians. Jewett's 'according to his will' renders 'vnto his pay', which echoes the first line, so the poem ends where it began.

Questions for study

How does the poem keep the figure of the pearl from the first stanza to the last, and how does its meaning change?
Trace the pearl from the lost jewel, through the maiden in pearls and the pearl of great price, to the gates of the city and the closing prayer.
Is Pearl an elegy or an allegory? Can it be both?
Consider the details of the child's age and kinship, the debates of Schofield and Gollancz, and how symbolic meaning grows out of a personal loss.
What are the dreamer's three errors in Canto V, and how does the rest of the poem address them?
Think about trusting the eyes, presuming to stay, and the river that cannot be crossed while alive.
How does the parable of the vineyard answer the dreamer's objection that the child has not earned her crown? Is the answer convincing?
Compare the dreamer's appeal to the Psalter with the maiden's appeal to the parable and to baptism.
What does courtesy mean in Pearl?
Look at Mary as Queen of Courtesy, the body of Christ in Canto VIII and the idea that every soul in heaven is a king or queen.
How does concatenation shape the argument as well as the form of the poem?
Choose one link word, such as 'more', 'mote', 'innocent' or 'paye', and follow its shifting senses through a section.
Why does the dreamer describe the New Jerusalem by following Revelation so closely? What does this do to his authority as a visionary?
Consider the refrain on John in Canto XVII and the difference between the dream landscape of Canto II and the city of Canto XVII.
What is the significance of the wound in the Lamb's side in Canto XIX?
Think about suffering in glory and how the image might console a grieving father.
Does the dreamer learn anything? How complete is his consolation at the end?
Weigh the plunge into the river and the 'more than is sent' against the closing prayer and the turn to the Eucharist.
What connections can you draw between Pearl and the other poems of Cotton Nero A.x, especially Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?
Consider the 101 stanzas, the circular endings, the theme of purity, and the encounter of a human figure with a demanding test.