(1300s) poet
The identity of the Pearl poet remains unknown, but he is attributed with the writing of four Middle English poems: Pearl, Patience, Purity (or Cleanness), and sir gawainand the green knight, all composed in the latter half of the 14th century and written down around 1400. The poet’s work suggests that he was well read, perhaps trained as a clerk, and he was acquainted with life in the higher social classes. Though he lived at the same time as chaucer and langland, he seems not to have been influenced by them. The Pearl poet was more at home in the countryside and traditions of northern and western Britain and had little to do with the fashionable circles of London.
The Pearl poet was part of the Alliterative Revival, which involved a resurgence of interest in earlier English heroic themes and the style of alliterative verse, which uses frequent repetition of sound for musical effect. His use of scripture proves the poet knew the Latin Bible, and the motif of the allegorical dream-vision along with the stanza formats and rhyme schemes are inherited from French tradition.
The plot of Pearl is simple: The narrator, sorrowing over the grave of his two-year-old daughter, has a vision in which she appears to him. His address to her conveys his sorrow:
“O Pearl!” said I, “in pearls arrayed,
Are you my pearl whose loss I mourn?
Lament alone by night I made… ”
As the poem proceeds, the young girl converses with the narrator about the joys of heaven and the errors of human grief. She grants him a glimpse of Paradise, which so excites him that, when he tries to join her, he is rudely awakened.
Composed in an intricate rhyme pattern, the poem uses the image of the pearl on multiple levels to represent the young girl, the delights of paradise, and the wisdom of Christian understanding. The poem is at once an elegy for the daughter, a consolation for loss, and an illumination of Christian doctrine, rendered in an artistic unity that makes it a work of singular beauty in the canon of Middle English literature.
Works by the Pearl Poet
The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. Translated by Casey Finch and edited by Malcolm Andrew and C. Peterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
The Pearl Poem in Middle and Modern English. Edited by William Vantuono. New York: University Press of America, 1987.
Works about the Pearl Poet
Moorman, Charles. The Pearl-Poet. New York: Twayne, 1968.
Rhodes, James Francis. Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-Poet. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
