SOURCE: "Pearl," in The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study, Cambridge at the University Press, 1970, pp. 96-170.

[In the following excerpt, Spearing describes Pearl as an extended dramatic narrative in which the literal-minded dreamer interacts with the celestial maiden in a way that reveals the difference between earthly human relationships and spiritual relationships.]

… In the fourteenth century the pearl could symbolize any of a very wide range of things; if a coherence is established within this variety, it is established by the poem itself, not by its sources and analogues.¹ In some ways it may be that we can better take Pearl as a guide to medieval symbolism than medieval symbolism as a guide to Pearl.

My purpose in what follows, then, is to read the poem with care: by no means an original aim, but more novel than it ought to be. It will be found, I believe, that Schofield was right in saying that 'The author's plan is to let the symbolism of his poem disclose itself slowly'.² The pearl image is not static but dynamic. It will be recalled that we found the same to be true of the central concept of clannesse in the poem Purity. We saw how, in the course of his poem, the Gawain poet redefined that concept so completely as in effect to re-create it, and how he did so by setting it in a variety of contexts taken from real situations, so that the idea developed in meaning as the poem extended itself in time. In Pearl the poet treats his central image, and perhaps other images such as that of the jeweller, in the same way, but now the development in meaning is co-ordinated with and expressed through a single developing human drama—the encounter between the Dreamer and the Pearl Maiden. The result is a poem more economical and more powerfully moving than Purity. The whole force and poignancy of Pearl derives from its basic structure as an encounter involving human relationship; and it is through the synthesis of symbol with this human drama that the poet conveys his meaning, and not, I believe, through any concealed layers of allegory.

Symbol and drama

The pearl symbol is first mentioned as the first word of the poem's first line—'Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye'—and the similarity between this line and the closing lines of the poem has not escaped notice. At the end, the reference is to the Prince of heaven, to whom the pearl now belongs; the narrator wishes that we too may be 'precious perlez unto his pay'. I have suggested that the poem has a circular effect, its head biting its own tail; but this does not mean that its tail is the same as its head. None the less, even so moderate an interpreter of the poem as Gordon has followed the earlier commentators cited by Schofield and has claimed that the prince of the first line means 'literally a prince of this world and symbolically Christ'.³ It is true of course that the parallel between the opening and closing lines is deliberate, and that on a second and subsequent readings of the poem the first line may recall the last, so that we shall have from the very beginning a sense of the nature of the development in meaning which is to take place. But this is not to say that the first line will mean the last, even symbolically. To agree that it does mean the last is surely to deny the nature of the poem as an object which, for its reader, is extended in time, and is therefore capable of discursive or dramatic development. And in this case we may miss the point of the first section of the poem. It begins with an exclamation in praise of 'the pearl' (i.e. pearls in general), and already a development in meaning begins as 'the pearl' slides unobtrusively across into another sense (i.e. one particular pearl):

Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere!
Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,
Ne proved I never her precios pere.
(1-4)

Those lines, taken by themselves, might belong to averse lapidary, and refer to the pearl as a literal precious stone, valued by literal earthly princes. This sense remains throughout the opening section: we can always understand that the narrator is referring to a jewel, and to the loss of a jewel. But there are also suggestions in this opening section that he is using the language of a lapidary in order to refer to something else: a girl or woman. They begin with the reference to the pearl as her. This indication that the pearl is feminine might be simply a matter of grammatical gender, perle deriving from a word which is feminine in French.⁴ But the next two lines intensify the suggestion of femininity in such a way as to hint at sex rather than gender:

So rounde, so reken in uche araye,
So smal, so smothe, her sydez were.
(5-6)

Here araye could mean either the setting of a stone or the dress of a person, and sydez could mean either the surface of a pearl or the flanks of a woman. Other suggestions that the pearl is an image used of a person come from what the narrator goes on to tell us of his feelings about its loss, particularly when the loss is first mentioned:

Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere;
Thurgh gresse to groimde hit fro me yot.
I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere,
Of that pryvy perle wythouten spot.
(9-12)

In later stanzas in the opening section he speaks of the grievous affliction of his heart, the burning and swelling of his breast, of clasping his hands in misery, of the fierce obstinacy of his grief. These are feelings that would be highly extravagant, Shylock-like indeed, if directed towards a jewel, but which are normal as part of the conventional language of love-suffering in medieval poetry. We noted earlier that luf-daungere suggests fine amour. It remains a case of suggestion, however: the implications of the phrasing are not pinned down by any explicit statement. We are faced with suggestiveness of a kind that belongs to poetry rather than to theology, and what it suggests is that the relationship between the narrator and the lost pearl is in some sense a human love-relationship, and that the loss involved is the death of a beloved girl or woman. She is 'clad in clot' (22) rather than in 'golde so clere', the earth is accused of marring her beauty, and she is now rotting. Yet at the same time as these hints of a human relationship broken by death are given, the original indications that the pearl is simply a pearl are by no means dropped. The refrain line throughout this section is some variant of 'that precios perle wythouten spotte', and the pearl is also referred to as a 'myry juele' (23) which 'trendeled doun' on to a 'huyle' (41), and as 'such rychez' (26).

Now we may, if we choose, refer to this deliberate intermingling of human suggestions and jewel suggestions as 'allegory', though the word is usually employed to indicate some more precise system of equivalences. But if we do call it allegory we need to recognize that it is the narrator who is being an allegorist, not necessarily the poet. This narrator is imposing on waking reality some vague equivalent to the kind of allegorical structure that the Lover in the Roman de la Rose finds ready-made in the world of his dream. The narrator, we gather, has lost by her death someone dear to him, and he thinks it appropriate to speak of the death of a person in terms of the loss of a precious stone: that is to say, that he sees it as the total and irrevocable loss of a valuable object, towards which the proper response is one of passionate and hopeless mourning. His attitude in this opening section is some-what reminiscent of that of the man in black in The Book of the Duchess, a poem from which all hint of an otherworldly consolation is carefully excluded, even to the extent of omitting the consolatory metamorphosis from the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. In Pearl, even more than in Chaucer's dream-poem, this dramatic grief is made attractive, framed as it is in a scene which delights the senses with strange music and with the brightness and fragrance of flowers and herbs. But our response to the narrator's grief should not be one simply of surrender. The garden in which it is set forms a traditional pleasance or locus amoenus,^5> but the season in which the narrator enters it is not the traditional one of spring or Maytime but August, harvest-time, 'Quen corne is corven wyth crokez kene' (40). This unusual season may have had symbolic associations of one sort or another, as indeed may the flowers and herbs,⁶ but it also has a compelling poetic effect. This effect is in harmony with the landscape's noticeable lack of one constant feature of the traditional locus amoenus, namely the stream or river. The landscape provides, we may say, an 'objective correlative' to the emotions of the narrator. About both there is a hint of the over-ripe, the unrefreshed, the drowsy, and perhaps of the merely passive: the corn awaiting the sickle, the narrator surrendering to his overpowering emotion. He does not see things with May-morning clarity; though he feels deeply the value of the lost pearl, by relying merely on feeling he underestimates its preciousness, seeing it not, as at the end of the poem, as precious to the Prince of heaven, but as precious only to earthly princes. As the opening lines hint, and as is made explicit later in the poem, the narrator is defined as a 'jeweller', aware only of material values.

That we are intended to adopt a critical attitude towards the narrator, even while feeling fully the pathos of his situation, is suggested by the way in which he refers to the flowers growing on the spot where his pearl was lost (that is, in human terms, the grave of the beloved):

Blomez blayke and blwe and rede
Ther schynez ful schyr agayn the sunne.
Flor and fryte may not be fede
Ther hit doun drof in moldez dunne;
For uch gresse mot grow of graynez dede;
No whete were ellez to wonez wonne.
(27-32)

The last two lines embody an allusion to a familiar Scriptural text, John xii. 24-5:

Amen, amen dico vobis, nisi granum frumenti
 cadens in terrain mortuum fiierit,
 Ipsum solum manet; si autem mortuum
 fuerit, multum fhictum affert.
(Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain
  of wheat falling into the ground die,
  Itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it
  bringeth forth much fruit.)

But it is clear that the narrator has misunderstood this text: he has taken the fruit which grows from the dead grain to be material, like the flowers on the grave. If he recalled the next words in John, he would have understood that it was the spiritual fruit of eternal life:

Qui amat animam suam, perdet earn; et qui odit animam suam in hoc mundo, in vitam aeternam custodii earn.

(John xii. 25)

(He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world keepeth it unto life eternal.)

The narrator, then, has been mistaken to talk about the dead person as something which can be lost as completely as a jewel. Once a pearl is lost in the earth, it is lost for ever, but a person is an immortal soul as well as a corruptible body, and, by physical death, can gain eternal life. The narrator's grief, however touching and understandable, is mistaken, because it leaves out of account the immortality of the dead person's soul. His pearl may be lost to him for the time being, but it is not absolutely lost. His mistakenness comes close to being explicitly acknowledged in the final stanza of the opening section, where the earliest openly Christian reference occurs:

A devely dele in my hert denned,
Thagh resoun sette myselven saght.
I playned my perle that ther watz spenned
Wyth fyrce skyllez that faste faght;
Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned,
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte.
(51-6)

It is not clear to what extent this perception represents the narrator's awareness at the time, or the awareness he achieved later as a result of the experience recorded in the poem. It does not need to be clear (we have noted that such ambiguity is part of the poem's technique), for its work has been done once it points towards a conflict between the narrator's violent and persuasive emotions and some as yet undefined rational and Christian attitude. The conflict is not immediately developed, for at this point the narrator is overcome by sleep, and becomes the Dreamer.

His body remains in hoc mundo, in the garden, but his spirit is transported to the new landscape of 'life eternal'. It is, as we have seen, another 'gardyn gracios gaye' (260), another version of the traditional locus amoenus, but this time a different version, shining with brilliant light and hard with metal and precious stones. This other world is conceived with the Gawain-poet's usual concreteness, but the concreteness is not used in quite the same way as when he recreates Old Testament scenes in Purity or Patience. There the purpose of the concreteness is to naturalize and familiarize: it is a matter of introducing table-cloths and oaktrees into the deserts of Palestine. Coming from Purity, we might expect in Pearl to find the other world full of angels having picnics under the oaktrees, but in fact what the poet does is to evoke an exotic and genuinely otherworldly landscape, but still to re-create it in full solidity, with no hint of any vagueness or uncertainty. The more homely aspects of the Old Testament poems here become part of the Dreamer's naïveté, not part of the reality he naïvely regards. In this other world, the crystal cliffs, the blue-trunked trees with silver leaves, the gravel made of pearls, make up a kind of sciencefiction landscape: it is planetary or lunar in its strangeness, and has a technicolour harshness in its brilliance. We have seen how the poet uses metallic similes to sharpen the sensory effect. He also employs one or two ingeniously precise similes of the 'as mote in at a munster dore' type for the same purpose. For example:

In the founce ther stonden stonez stepe,
As glente thurgh glas that glowed and glyght,
As stremande sternez, quen strothe-men slepe,
Staren in welkyn in wynter nyght.
(113-16)

In the first of these similes describing the stones at the bottom of the rivers, the suggestion is perhaps of stained glass with the sun shining through it. The second simile, while seeming to be developed into an independent scene almost for its own sake, in fact heightens the original sensory effect with its strongly evocative details of the winter night and of men sleeping while the stars burn. Sound and rhythm, as always, have their part to play in calling up the scene, as in the two lines preceding those just quoted, where s's and r's create a whispering effect, while repeated present participles suggest the irregular, halting progress of the swirling water as it turns back on itself:

Swangeande swete the water con swepe,
With a rownande rourde raykande aryght.
(111-12)

Or one might mention the pebbly feel of

The gravayl that on grounde con grynde
Wern precious perlez of oryente.
(81-2)

That last line contains the first mention of pearls in the poem's second section, and the context of the landscape of which it forms part draws out two further aspects of the meaning latent in the pearl symbol: its brilliance and its hard permanence. Light, the effusion of God, is the favourite medieval image of beauty, and here the more human beauty which the pearl had at first in the narrator's memory—'So smal, so smothe her sydez were'—has begun, through emphasis on new aspects of the same symbol, to merge into a heavenly beauty. The pearl is now part of a landscape dazzling, overpowering in its brightness:

For urthely herte myght not suffyse
To the tenthe dole of tho gladnez glade.
(135-6)

And the preciousness which was susceptible of death has in the same way begun to turn into a more permanent but harder preciousness. Thus, although the pearl symbol has for the moment reverted to its original sense of a precious stone, it has done so only to develop in new directions. We shall find that none of its separate senses is abandoned in the course of the poem, but any of them may momentarily come to the surface for the sake of a further development of associations.

This is the only mention of pearls in the second or third sections of the poem, but in the third section the Maiden appears for the first time. She is not at once identified with the lost pearl; by making use of the slow perception of his Dreamer, the poet is able to unfold his symbol gradually. At first what the Dreamer sees in her is the hard brilliance of the pearl, and an almost unbearable purity of whiteness. She is sitting on the other side of the river that cuts through the dream landscape, at the foot of a glittering crystal cliff, a courteous and gracious lady, dressed in a gleaming white mantle, who shines 'As glysnande golde that man con schere' (165): another characteristically precise simile—not just like gold, but like freshly cut gold. Not even in the feverish jargon of washing-powder advertisements does modern English have enough words meaning shining, glittering, radiant, and so on, to translate all the poet's different ways of expressing the effusion of light. Within all this overpowering glitter, the Dreamer comes only slowly to recognize the Maiden; and he says so with a naïve simplicity that will be characteristic of his attitude towards her in this encounter. He remarks only, 'I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere' (164), and again:

On lenghe I loked to hyr there;
The lenger, I knew hyr more and more.
(167-8)

At last, this figure, at first still as a statue, begins to move. First she raises her head, so that the Dreamer can see 'Hyr vysayge whyt as playn yvore' (178), then she rises to her feet, and walks down to the river bank. This slow process of encounter and recognition is one of great emotional turmoil for the Dreamer. His heart is stunned (blunt, 176) and full of astonished confusion (ful stray atount, 179), and he is afraid that having seen her he may lose her again. It is through this moving and convincing crisis of human feeling that the meaning of the symbol is developed for us, rather than through the existence from the beginning of parallel allegorical layers.

At this point it is still not perfectly clear who it is that the Dreamer recognizes when he recognizes the Maiden, but it becomes clear in the course of the next section of the poem, section IV, in which her appearance and dress are described in great detail. Here pearls are mentioned again and again, as part of a 'fashion plate' description of her dress. The normal medieval descriptive method, of accumulation rather than selection, is used, but more effectively here than in the description of the temple vessels in Purity, because it is directed to a single end, the intensification of pearl qualities. (It has often been pointed out that there was a special enthusiasm for pearls in fourteenth-century courtly society, so that at the same time the Maiden is shown to be a great and fashionable lady.)⁷ She is wearing a white linen mantle, open at the sides, and trimmed with pearls, with hanging sleeves also decorated with pearls. Her kirtle is to match, and again is covered with pearls. She wears a crown of pearls, and her complexion is as pearl-like as the pearls with which she is adorned:

Her depe colour yet wonted non
Of precios perle in porfyl pyghte.
(215-16)

The culmination of this description is reached with a single flawless pearl at her breast:

Bot a wonder perle wythouten wemme
Inmyddez hyr breste watz sette so sure;
A mannez dome moght dryghly demme
Er mynde moght malte in hit mesure.
I hope no tong moght endure
No saverly saghe say of that syght,
So watz hit clene and cler and pure,
That precios perle ther hit watz pyght.
(221-8)

To attempt to distinguish the symbolic significance of this one pearl from that of the Pearl Maiden herself would be to misunderstand, indeed to resist, the poet's methods. Certainly this pearl seems to have special associations with purity or virginity, in such phrases as wythouten wemme, but these only recall and develop an idea which had been present from the first section of the poem, with its use of wythouten spot as the refrain phrase. The order in which the poem's symbolism is unfolded is significant, but it is a single symbol, with a single though complex meaning, which is being evolved, and any attempt at minute allegorical distinctions will only obscure the poem's central achievement. Even more mistaken is Sister Hillmann's attempt to distinguish the Pearl Maiden from the lost pearl. It is true that the Maiden 'does not identify herself with the material pearl'⁸ explicitly, but the continuity of the symbol is beyond question. When the Dreamer first sees the Maiden move there are striking verbal reminiscences of the lost pearl of the poem's opening stanza:

That gracios gay wythouten galle,
So smothe, so smal, so seme slyght,
Rysez up in hir araye ryalle,
A precios pyece in perlez pyght.
(189-92)

'So smothe, so smal' recalls 'So smal, so smothe her sydez were' (6), while 'hir araye ryalle' is in keeping with the royal associations of 'Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye' (1). The Maiden curtsies to the Dreamer, takes off her crown to him, and greets him; and his first words to her, though their form is interrogative, work through their repetitions to complete the identification of the Maiden with the lost jewel:

'O perle,' quod I, 'in perlez pyght,
Art thou my perle that I haf playned,
Regretted by myn one on nyghte?'
(241-3)

There can surely be no doubt, if only we respond to the poem, that this Pearl Maiden is (though no doubtin some complex sense of the word 'is') his lost pearl. I have already argued that the lost pearl is to be seen as a person, and that, if we wish to reconstruct a specific human situation, she is most plausibly seen as the Dreamer's daughter dead in infancy. This is a convenient point to pause and ask why the poet did not make it easier for us to reconstruct this situation. Why did he mystify us with talk about aunts and nieces, and why did he allow the Dreamer to use the language of fine amour as well as that of fatherly love in referring to the pearl? We have been seeing how the poem works not by making clear-cut identifications and distinctions of the kind that belong to theology, but by vaguemergings and emergings of an essentially poetic kind. We may now be prepared to see that the same could be true of the (fictional) situation 'behind' the poem. If the poet left the relationship between the Dreamer and the Maiden vague, perhaps he did so because he wanted it to be vague. It is true, of course, that he gained certain advantages by the hints of a father-daughter relationship. It has been pointed out, for example, that 'there seems to be a special significance in the situation where the doctrinal lesson given by the celestial maiden comes from one of no earthly wisdom to her proper teacher and instructor in the natural order'.⁹ Because the Dreamer at once recognizes the Maiden as one who in her earthly existence was 'So smothe, so smal, so seme slyght' (190), he is unable for a long time to grasp that the statement

A mannez dorn moght dryghly demme
Er mynde moght malte in hit mesure
(223-4)

is true of her doctrine as well as of the pearl at her breast. But the poet could gain further advantages by leaving the father-daughter relationship as a matter of hints only, and adding to it hints of other relationships, such as that of lover and beloved. One such advantage would be that of widening the poem's appeal for a courtly audience, who would be used to poems about fine amour, but less ready to respond to a poem about fatherly love. A more important advantage was that it enabled the poet to write a poem not about one particular relationship, but about human relationship in general: about earthly relationship, and its meaning in the context of death and of the other world beyond death. It was for this reason, no doubt, that he reserved the clinching phrase 'In Krystez dere blessyng and myn' (1208) for the final stanza: he did not wish to pin the poem down to a single specific relationship until the last possible moment. My argument has been that the Gawain-poet's central subject is the impact of the more than human upon the human, and the reassessment of human values that must follow from this. This is, I believe, the central subject of Pearl too, and before returning to the text of the poem I shall examine this idea further.

The situation in which the Dreamer finds himself in the heavenly world of Pearl reminds me of an incident in the life of Jesus recorded by St Matthew. The Sadducees, 'who say there is no resurrection' (Matthew xxii. 23), put to Jesus a problem about a woman who was married seven times in succession, to seven men who were all brothers—an imaginary situation, no doubt, intended to trap Jesus, rather than a difficulty that was always cropping up in real life. She outlived them all, and then eventually died herself, and the Sadducees wanted to know whose wife she would be in the resurrection. Jesus answered, 'in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married, but shall be as the angels of God in heaven' (xxii. 30). One meaning of this answer is to indicate that in the heavenly world the terminology of earthly relationship simply ceases to apply. One way of seeing Pearl is as an imaginative extension of this statement and of other New Testament statements like it (for example, in some of the parables of the kingdom) about the nature of the heavenly world. In our world, people exist above all through human relationships. Man is a social animal, and his very personality is largely formed by a succession of relationships: a series of marriages, as it were, including that with his parents and that with his children, and centring usually in marriage itself. Take away this network of human relationships, and the individual withers. Nevertheless, in the kingdom of heaven as postulated by the Christian revelation, this familiar network is dissolved away, and yet the individual soul survives. In Pearl, this is the state of which the Dreamer has a visionary foretaste: human relationship itself is dissolved away, and in the case of the Maiden, who, through having died, truly belongs to this other world, it has been replaced by relationship of a different and utterly strange kind. We shall be examining that in detail shortly, but for the moment let us consider simply how the Maiden explains to the Dreamer that in the heavenly world she is a bride of the Lamb and Queen of Heaven. He protests that this position can belong to the Blessed Virgin alone, but she explains further that all the 144,000 virgins in the heavenly city are also brides of the Lamb and Queens of Heaven. Now in human terms this is meaningless nonsense: we are obviously not to imagine something like the Wife of Bath's 'octogamye' multiplied many times over. But it is evidently only by inventing such nonsense that human language can be used to hint at the transcendent system of relationships, centring in God, that exists in the heavenly world. All that is clear to the Dreamer is that he is excluded from this new order: he has lost his pearl on earth, through her death, and even by visiting the other world in a vision he cannot regain her, because he has no part in this new system of relationships, and cannot even understand it except in terms of the old. Hence the pain his vision causes him; and he seems to feel an even sharper anguish at being confronted with the Maiden inexplicably at home in an incomprehensible other world than he did at the simple fact of her death in this world. It is in this sense, then, that Pearl can be said to be about relationship itself. To say 'Ho watz me nerre then aunte or nece', without specifying further, implies all close human relationships, in such a way as to enable the individual reader or listener to fill out the vagueness with his own experiences of human relationship. At the same time, to talk of aunts and nieces when confronted with a transfigured heavenly being betrays an inability to see reality in any other terms than those of the family relationships with which we are most familiar. The effect of this inability on the Dreamer's part is one of mingled pathos and comedy.

In the heavenly world of his dream, the Dreamer is certainly a figure at once pathetic and comic. At first, on seeing the Maiden, he is simply stunned:

Wyth yyen open and mouth ful clos,
I stod as hende as hawk in halle.
(183-4)

Then he discloses expectations that not only contradict his earlier attitude in the garden but are quite out of keeping with the heavenly order of things. In the garden, he had mourned his pearl as though she were irrevocably lost. In the dream, recognizing that she still exists, he expresses new assumptions, though still of a kind familiar to us. We find them innocently and pathetically expressed nowadays in the obituary and memorial columns of newpapers. In the heavenly world, we shall achieve a reunion with the dear departed 'on the other shore'; the threads of earthly relationship will be picked up just where they were dropped, nothing essential will be altered, but all the difficulties and tensions involved in earthly relationships will miraculously be dissolved away. These are the dreams with which modern Christians often console themselves, despite all that the Gospels have to say about the essential strangeness and incomprehensibility of the heavenly order. And they are the Dreamer's expectations too. His first words to the Maiden (to return to the text where we left it) express his surprise at finding her alive after all, when previously, for all his theoretical Christianity, he had assumed that she was dead. He is almost reproachful towards her. He has been suffering the agonies of a rejected lover, yet now he finds her very pleasantly accommodated after all:

'O perle', quod I, 'in perlez pyght,
Art thou my perle that I haf playned,
Regretted by myn one on nyghte?
Much longeyng haf I for the layned,
Sythen into gresse thou me aglyghte.
Pensyf, payred, I am forpayned,
And thou in a lyf of lykyng lyghte,
In Paradys erde, of stryf unstrayned.
What wyrde hatz hyder my juel vayned,
And don me in thy s del and gret daunger?'
(241-50)

Along with the genuineness of this suffering, which arouses our compassion, the last question, coming from a Christian, is almost ridiculously inept. What else could he have expected to find? The Maiden answers him without giving the reassurance he is groping for. She is grave, exact, and severe: 'Sir, ye haf your tale mysetente' (257). She goes on to explain, in a passage we have already examined, that all that he lost was in fact a rose, subject to the natural process of decay; but the rose has now proved to be 'a perle of prys' (272). The Dreamer begs her pardon for his misunderstanding, only to flounder confidently into the further error of the 'on the other shore' theory:

'Iwyse,' quod I, 'my blysfol beste,
My grete dystresse thou al todrawez.
To be excused I make requeste;
I trawed my perle don out of dawez.
Now haf I fonde hyt, I schal ma feste,
And wony wyth hyt in schyr wod-schawez,
And love my Lorde and al his lawez
That hatz me broght thys blys ner.
Now were I at yow byyonde thise wawez,
I were a joyful jueler.'
(279-88)

This facile hope of a happy-ever-after reunion is met with an even more stinging rebuke from the Maiden, and a devastatingly complete analysis of his error, divided into three parts. She begins with a question and an exclamation which decisively withdraw her from the realm of humanity—you human beings!—'Wy borde ye men? So madde ye be!' (290). In the cruelty of this one might sense the callousness of a small child, not seeing how much words can hurt; yet at the same time it can be seen as deliberate and necessary harshness, for the Dreamer has no hope of gaining further understanding unless he can be shocked out of his fool's paradise. She continues:

Thre wordez hatz thou spoken at ene:
Unavysed, for sothe, wern alle thre.
Thou ne woste in worlde quat on dotz mene;
Thy worde byfore thy wytte con fle.
Thou says thou trawez me in this dene,
Bycawse thou may wyth yyen me se;
Another thou says, in thys countré
Thyself schal won wyth me ryght here;
The thrydde, to passe thys water fre—
That may no joy fol jueler.
(291-300)

She then corrects each of his false statements separately. In the case of the first, it is important not to misunderstand her correction. She is not saying that he is mistaken in trusting the evidence of his eyes that she is 'in this dene' of paradise, but that he is mistaken in believing her to be there only because he can see her with his eyes.¹⁰ She really is there (there is no hint of her being in the dream landscape only potentially), but he should have known that she would be without seeing her, because, as a Christian, he knew of God's promise of immortality for the soul. Her answer helps to define the failing that the Dreamer has in common with most Christians: the failure to take with full seriousness, to realize to himself, religious truths that he knows perfectly well in theory:

I halde that jueler lyttel to prayse
That levez wel that he segh wyth yye,
And much to blame and uncortayse
That levez oure Lorde wolde make a lyye,
That lelly hyghte your lyf to rayse,
Thagh fortune dyd your flesch to dyye.
Ye setten hys wordez ful westernays
That levez nothynk bot ye hit syye.

And that is a poynt o sorquydryye,
That uche god mon may evel byseme,
To leve no tale be true to tryye
Bot that hys one skyl may deme.
(301-12)

The Dreamer's second error, in supposing that he can now dwell with the maiden 'in this bayly' (315), she corrects by pointing out that he must first ask permission, and that this may not be granted. His third error, in proposing to cross the river-barrier which separates them, she corrects by reminding him that Adam's sin makes it necessay that he should die before he can do so.

Discourse and drama

At this point, a complete change has begun to come over the course of the poem. Previously, the burden of meaning had been carried by the pearl symbol itself; but, by his evident failure to understand the Maiden's complex and highly poetic image of the transformation of the rose into the pearl, the Dreamer has shown that he is unable to make any further progress through the development of symbolism. He is hopelessly literal-minded, as dreamers in fourteenth-century poems tend to be. We may recall, for example, how in The Book of the Duchess the man in black tries to explain the nature of his loss to the Dreamer by using chess imagery: he was playing at chess with Fortune and lost his queen. The Chaucerian Dreamer is utterly bewildered by this:

 ther is no man alyve her
Wolde for a fers make this woo!
(740-1)

And so the man in black has to turn to more literal language, and tell his life-story. In The Book of the Duchess, however, chess imagery is only peripheral; in Pearl pearl imagery is absolutely central, and it is therefore all the more striking that from this point on it is simply dropped. For more than four hundred lines the pearl symbol undergoes no further development, and simpler, more explicit forms of exposition take its place. The Maiden's division of the Dreamer's error into three parts occurs at the end of section ν. In section VI the word perle occurs only twice, as a name:

My precios perle dotz me gret pyne;
(330)

When I am partlez of perle myne.
(335)

In section VII it again occurs only twice, in the form of references to what has already occurred when the poem begins:

Fro thou watz wroken fro uch a wothe,
I wyste never quere my perle watz gon;
(375-6)

Thow wost wel when thy perle con schede,
I watz ful yong and tender of age.
(411-12)

In sections VIII, IX, X, XI and XII the word perle does not occur at all. Throughout this large central part of the poem the human drama of the encounter between Dreamer and Maiden continues to unfold itself, but it is accompanied not by any symbolic development but by the development of argument and explicit doctrine.

This has begun with the Maiden's threefold analysis of the Dreamer's error. In answer to her correction, the Dreamer persists in seeing the situation in terms of his own misery; for him (and this is eminently natural) the crucial fact about her careful statement is not that it is true but that it hurts him. It throws him into a despair like that in which Jonah wishes that God would slay him, though in the Dreamer's case the misery is more genuine and less histrionic:

Now rech I never for to declyne,
Ne how fer of folde that man me fleme.
When I am partiez of perle myne,
Bot durande doel what may men deme?
(333-6)

Once more the Maiden rebukes him with what seems like cruelty—a cruelty that may again suggest a child in its apparent inability even to understand his suffering. The rebuke is now more clearly directed not at his opinions and expectations, but at the attitude of mind that underlies them:

'Thow demez noght bot doel-dystresse,'
Thenne say de that wyght. 'Why dotz thou so?
For dyne of doel of lurez lesse,
Ofte mony mon forgos the mo.
The oghte better thyselven blesse,
And love ay God, in wele and wo,
For anger gaynez the not a cresse.
Who nedez schal thole, be not so thro.
For thogh thou daunce as any do,
Braundysch and bray thy brathez breme,
When thou no fyrre may, to ne fro,
Thou moste abyde that he schal deme.'
(337-48)

The picture the Maiden paints of him here is a cruel caricature, using an undignified animal image like the image of the hawk he had earlier applied to himself, and suggesting a thwarted child stamping and shouting in anger. It relates him very clearly to the anti-hero of Patience, the impatient man who foolishly resists the power of God, refusing to acknowledge that he lives in a world over which God has absolute control, and in which ultimately man has no choice but to do God's will. The conclusion 'Thou moste abyde that he schal deme' is hard but just, and a full response to the poem will take account of both its hardness and its justice. Our own thoughts and feelings should be engaged on both sides of the encounter; we shall recognize the absurdity of the Dreamer's position, and yet—because it is based on a completely natural human response, and because the Dreamer is 'I', not 'he'—we shall also share in his suffering.

The Dreamer now begins to undergo a development that was beyond the scope of Jonah, and still more of any of the examples of fylthe in Purity. He learns from the Maiden's insistence on the need to recognize facts, and especially the fact of God's omnipotence. He apologizes to God—'Ne worthe no wraththe unto my Lorde' (362)—and shows a new humility towards the Maiden:

Rebuke me never wyth wordez felle,
Thagh I forloyne, my dere endorde.
(367-8)

He begins to recognize that there is a distance between them, but he persists in seeing that distance in earthly terms. Sometimes this produces an acute pathos, as when he begs her:

God forbede we be now wrothe,
We meten so seiden by stok other ston.
(379-80)

Here the tag 'by stok other ston' has an effect similar to that of the other tag 'aunte or nece': by its very nature as a cliché belonging to earthly meetings and separations it makes us feel the Dreamer's loneliness in the strange world of his dream. Such tags seem to be used for this purpose almost systematically. In the next stanza the Dreamer begs the Maiden to tell him 'What lyf ye lede erly and late' (392), and there again 'erly and late' touches one by its reminder of the familiar earthly world in the midst of the timeless heavenly world to which it is so strikingly inapplicable. Having grasped that there is now an unbridgeable distance between himself and the Maiden, the Dreamer can only see that distance as it might be in this world: as a social distance. She has somehow gone up in the world, and joined an aristocracy before the courtly grandeur of which he feels as abashed as the Chaucerian dreamer faced with the man in black or the God of Love. The distance between them is one of manners:

Thagh cortaysly ye carp con,
I am bot mol and manerez mysse.
(381-2)

Yet he can at least take vicarious pleasure in her advancement:

For I am ful fayn that your astate
Is worthen to worschyp and wele, iwysse.
(393-4)

And he is naturally curious about her new way of life.

At this point a digression may be necessary if I am to make my view of the poem clear. The Gawain-poet really is presenting the transcendent heavenly order in terms of material royalty, luxury and grandeur; it really is the case that for him an earthly kingdom is a valid 'image … of the Kingdom (significant word) of Heaven'.¹¹ And in this he is following a powerful tradition in medieval religious writing, found in English from the time of such twelfth-century texts as the Ancrene Riwle, where God is figured as a powerful and knightly king, full of deboneirté, who woos a lady besieged in her castle; or as The Wooing of Our Lord, where Christ is represented as wooing the human soul, and possessing in himself all the qualities that would be most desirable in an aristocratic husband—wealth, largesce, power, beauty. (The images of wooing and marriage, deriving from the Song of Songs, also reappear in Pearl.) And of course in the medieval visual arts God is regularly represented as a king, and heaven as an earthly court. If the heavenly order is to be represented in earthly images at all (and earthly images are all we know), what images could an aristocratie society better choose than those of earthly royalty? But intelligent people in the fourteenth century knew as well as we do that these images were only images, not realities; and so we find the author of The Cloud of Unknowing referring scathingly to those naïvely devout men who 'wil make a God as hem lyst, and clothen Hym ful richely in clothes, and set Hym in a trone, fer more curiously than ever was He depeynted in this erthe. Thees men wil maken aungelles in bodely licnes, and set hem aboute ich one with diverse minstralsie, fer more corious than ever was any seen or herde in this liif.'¹² What the Gawain-poet has done in Pearl is to find a way of simultaneously using such material images for the divine and making us aware of their inadequacy. He does this by means of his naïve Dreamer, who can see the grandeur into which his pearl entered on the other side of death only in grossly material terms, as a higher social status. It would not be a great exaggeration to think of him as something of a snob; he has at least a keen sense of social status, a tendency to see reality in terms of social differences (one of his first thoughts on seeing the Maiden in her new state was that her face was 'sade for doc other erle' [211]), and a powerful curiosity about how the great live in their heavenly world. This must not be taken to imply that the Gawain-poet is as scornful as the Cloud-author of the use of royal and courtly images for heaven, or that he totally dissociates himself from the Dreamer's view of them. On the contrary, they are an essential part of his poem, and he clearly takes a real and unashamed delight in describing the grandeur and glitter of the heavenly world and the heavenly city. For him, as not perhaps for us, such images remained natural and viable. But it is significant that he represents God himself not as a great king or lord, but (following the Apocalypse) as the Lamb, a far more mysterious and unearthly image, in which magnificance is strangely mingled with suffering.

To return to the text: the Maiden expresses her approval of the Dreamer's new humility:

'Now blysse, burne, mot the bytyde,'
Then sayde that lufsoum of lyth and lere,
'And welcum here to walk and byde,
For now thy speche is to me dere.
Maysterful mod and hyghe pryde,
I hete the, arn heterly hated here.'
(397-402)

His emotional readjustment makes possible further intellectual progress, and she at once explains, simply and openly, the terms of her new life. She is married to the Lamb of God, he has crowned her as his queen forever, and as such she is 'sesed in alle hys herytage' (417). Inevitably, the Dreamer takes this explanation with complete literalness, and understands it in earthly terms. Taken in this way, it is indeed startling, and his first reaction is a shocked remark, halfway between question and exclamation: ' "Blysful," quod I, "may thys be trwe?"' (421). He quickly pulls himself up, afraid of having offended her, only to repeat the question:

Dysplesez not if I speke errour.
Art thou the quene of hevenez blwe,
That al thys world schal do honour?
(422-4)

He imagines that she must be claiming to have supplanted the Blessed Virgin herself, for the kingdom of heaven, like earthly kingdoms, can surely have only one queen at a time. She carefully explains that this is not so:

The court of the kyndom of God alyve
Hatz a property in hytself beyng:
Alle that may therinne aryve
Of alle the reme is quen other kyng,
And never other yet schal depryve,
But uchon fayn of otherez hafyng.
(445-50)

This straightforward explanation makes as clear as possible the difficulty of using the language of everyday affairs, rather than that of poetic symbolism, about the divine. The Maiden's words are as exact as possible, depryve belonging (like herytage earlier) to the technical language of law, and property either to the same technical language or to that of scholastic philosophy,¹³ yet taken together they make up a statement which in earthly terms is nonsensical. The Dreamer makes the best effort he can to accommodate himself to what he says:

'Cortaysé,' quod I, 'I leve,
And charyté grete, be yow among.'
(469-70)

But he still cannot swallow it entirely, and, with indignation breaking through his caution, he continues:

Bot—my speche that yow ne greve—
Thyself in heven over hygh thou heve,
To make the quen that watz so yonge!
(471-4)¹⁴

It is her youth that sticks in his throat. If only she were a little older, she might somehow deserve this extraordinary promotion; as it is, he cannot bring himself either to believe or to approve anything so out of keeping with his ideas of justice:

That cortaysé is to fre of dede,
Yyf hyt be soth that thou conez saye.
Thou lyfed not two yer in oure thede;
Thou cowthez never God nauther plese ne
  pray,
Ne never nawther Pater ne Crede;
And quen mad on the fyrst day!
I may not traw, so God me spede,
That God wolde wrythe so wrange away.
Of countes, damysel, par ma fay,
Wer fayr in heven to hald asstate,
Other ellez a lady of lasse aray;
Bot a quene! Hit is to dere a date.
(481-92)

It is delightful that he should think of the court of heaven in such thoroughly earthly terms as to feel that it would be tolerable for her to be a countess in it, but not a queen; and this is perfectly in keeping with the sense of social distinctions he showed on first seeing her, when he thought her face 'sade for doc other erle' (211). A countess is the wife of an earl. And the speech is amusing not only in its naïve assumptions, but in the vigorous colloquialism of their expression. His indignation reaches its height when he has to mention the offensive word 'queen': we notice the almost angrily emphatic monosyllables of 'And quen mad on the fyrst day!' and the outraged squeak in the last line of the stanza: 'Bot a quene! Hit is to dere a date.' He would rather accuse God of extravagance than accept that. As everywhere in his work, the Gawain-poet shows a brilliant gift for mimicking tones of voice; to do this within the intricate metrical form of Pearl demands a virtuosity unusual even for him.

It is in answer to this indignant incredulity of the Dreamer's that the Maiden repeats and expounds the parable of the vineyard, which we examined earlier. That part of the poem (lines 493-588) is purely discursive, not even dramatic, and I need say no more about it here. Not till after the Maiden has finished re-telling the parable does the Dreamer once more intervene, with his insistence on judging things for himself—an insistence for which we may feel grateful, even while recognizing its unwisdom, since he voices doubts we may share. He has made some progress; though his tone of voice has its usual resolute earthliness, he is now measuring the Maiden's statements not merely against common sense but against Biblical authority:

Then more I meled and sayde apert,
'Me thynk thy tale unresounable.
Goddez ryght is redy and evermore rert,
Other Holy Wryt is bot a fable.
In Sauter is sayde a verce overte.'
(589-93)

Perhaps his characteristic 'Me thynk' may remind us of the repeated 'uus thynk' (552-3) of the disgruntled workmen in the parable; he has much in common with them. The Maiden recognizes his mood of scholastic disputatiousness—'Bot now thou motez, me for to mate' (613)—and once more answers in purely discursive terms, with an exposition of the roles of grace and justice in determining the fate of human souls, in which she first reverts to the parable to expound it allegorically, and then produces appropriate Scriptural texts to confirm her argument. We examined her treatment of these at an earlier stage. She concludes by referring to the Crucifixion as a deed more powerful than any abstract argument:

Forthy to corte quen thou schal com
Ther alle oure causez schal be tryed,
Alegge the ryght, thou may be innome,
By thys ilke spech I have asspyed;
Bot he on rode that blody dyed,
Delfully thurgh hondez thryght,
Gyve the to passe, when thou arte tryed,
By innocens and not by ryghte.
(701-8)

After so much discourse, this plain reference to the Crucifixion as an irreducible human event has an extraordinary emotive power. It leads the Maiden back to speak of the Ministry of Christ, again in simple and human terms: her place in heaven is to be justified ultimately not by bandying texts and arguments but by Christ's saying,

Do way, let chylder unto me tyght,
To suche is hevenryche arayed.
(718-19)

Symbolism resumed

On the question of the salvation of the innocent there is no more to be said; but now that this question has been settled, the poem can at last revert to its former course and former method of developing symbolism. Christ's words about 'the kingdom of heaven' lead naturally into another parable of the kingdom, this time one of the shortest, that of the pearl of great price:

Iterum simile est regnum caelorum homini negotiatori quaerenti bonas margaritas;

Inventa autem una pretiosa margarita, abiit, et vendidit omnia quae habuit, et emit eam.

(Matthew xiii. 45-6)

(Again the kingdom of heaven is like to a merchant seeking good pearls.

Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went his way and sold all that he had and bought it.)

The mention of pearls makes possible the resumption of pearl symbolism, after the long discursive central section:

Ther is the blys that con not blynne
That the jueler soghte thurgh perré pres,
And solde alle hys goud, bothe wolen and
 lynne,
To bye hym a perle watz mascellez.
(729-32)

The fact that we have here a planned resumption of the symbolism, rather than one dependent on chance associations, is demonstrated by the way in which the symbol is taken up again in section XIII at precisely the point at which it was abandoned in section V. The point at which the Dreamer's understanding failed was the image of the transformation of the rose into the pearl, and at that point, for the first time, the pearl was called a 'perle of prys' (272). Now, over 450 lines later, comes the parable of the pearl of great price. Moreover, in the refrain-lines of section V, the Dreamer was being referred to as a jeweller, with implications perhaps of materialism. The Maiden, for example, seemed to be using the language of trade, of profit and loss, for his benefit in a very pointed way:

And thou hatz called thy wyrde a thef,
That oght of noght hatz mad the cler.
(273-4)¹⁵

Now the image of the jeweller is redeemed by that of the merchant of the parable. Both the pearl and the jeweller remain viable as symbols, because they can include heavenly as well as earthly meanings. Recognition of this should perhaps modify the light in which one sees the human drama of the encounter between Dreamer and Maiden. I have been emphasizing mainly the gap between the two, with its consequences of the Dreamer's misunderstanding and the Maiden's apparent cruelty towards him. But symbols provide the means of bridging the gap between earthly and heavenly understanding, as the Scriptural parables of the kingdom bear witness. There is difference between the heavenly and earthly worlds, but there is also continuity, a continuity figured, for example, in the fact that the 'gardyn gracios gaye' of the dream is only another version of the 'erber grene' in which the narrator fell asleep. The earthly rose does not disappear, to be replaced by the heavenly pearl; it is 'put in pref' to (proves to be) a pearl. This complex relationship between the earthly and the heavenly is easily misunderstood. It is misunderstood by the Dreamer, who persistently sees only continuity between them; it is misunderstood by those modern scholars who see only difference.¹⁶ But the poem itself, with the delicacy and subtlety of poetic symbolism, opens the way to a truer understanding.

The Maiden proceeds immediately with a stanza in exposition of the parable of the pearl which seems designed to sum up the pearl symbolism as so far developed, and to take it further through the association with the kingdom of heaven:

This makellez perle, that boght is dere,
The joueler gef fore alle hys god,
Is lyke the reme of hevenesse clere:
So sayde the Fader of folde and flode;
For hit is wemlez, clene, and clere,
And endelez rounde, and blythe of mode,
And commune to alle that ryghtwys were.
Lo, even inmyddez my breste hit stode.
My Lorde the Lombe, that schede hys blode,
He pyght hit there in token of pes.
I rede the forsake the worlde wode
And porchace thy perle maskelles.
(733-44)

Here some of the associations previously accumulated by the symbol are gathered together. 'Wemlez, clene, and clere' reminds one of previous phrases such as 'wythouten wemme' and 'wythouten spot', and attention is now focused on the single pearl at the Maiden's breast, as it were the symbol of the symbol. This is available to the Dreamer as well as to the Maiden; but there would surely be no point in trying to distinguish separate layers of meaning in the pearl, and to differentiate between the pearl as the Maiden and the pearl as the kingdom of heaven, which is not her private possession but is 'commune to alle that ryghtwys were'. These figurative senses are inextricably entangled, and any attempt to schematize them is only too likely to result in an impoverished perception of the richness of the symbolic whole. The poetry works not by distinction but by fusion. The mingling of the various senses is recognized by the Dreamer in the very phrasing of his answer, in which 'he sums up the complex symbolism of the passage'¹⁷ we have been discussing:

'O maskelez perle in perlez pure,
That berez,' quod I, 'the perle of prys.'
(745-6)

The Dreamer goes on to ask who created her beauty, but before she can answer that question he asks another, which betrays once more his preoccupation with status: 'quat kyn offys' (755) does she hold in heaven? She answers that she is the bride of the Lamb of God, and repeats the invitation of the Song of Songs which he addressed to her:

Cum hyder to me, my lemman swete,
For mote ne spot is non in the.
(763-4)

The Dreamer then asks who this Lamb of God is; and in doing so he shows in its most materialistic form his preoccupation with social advancement. He imagines her progress as one of ruthless social climbing, elbowing aside all possible rivals, and culminating in an unparalleled triumph over them:

Quat kyn thyng may be that Lambe
That the wolde wedde unto hys vyf?
Over alle other so hygh thou clambe
To lede wyth hym so ladyly lyf.
So mony a comly on-uunder cambe
For Kryst han lyved in much stryf;
And thou con alle tho dere out dryf
And fro that maryag al other depres,
Al only thyself so stout and styf,
A makelez may and maskellez.
(771-80)

The Dreamer is now prepared to accept that the Maiden really has achieved the highest rank, but he has clearly not understood her earlier explanation of the universal kingship and queenship of the blessed. The tone of his remarks is roughly that of a bourgeois father's astonished admiration at his daughter's unexpected marriage with the royal family's most eligible bachelor. And this tone is supported by the strikingly secular implications of some of the terms he applies to her. 'Comly on-uunder cambe' is a formula belonging to a formulaic system regularly applied to ladies in romances and love-poems; two other examples are 'lufsum under lyne', applied to the lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1814), and 'geynest under gore' from the Harley lyric Alysoun.¹⁸ 'Stout and styf' is another alliterative formula, belonging to medieval romance, but implying the heroic resolution of the warrior rather than the modesty appropriate to a lady.¹⁹ We can reasonably deduce that such phrases would have seemed glaringly inappropriate to the Maiden's true nature, and it is possible that for a courtly fourteenth-century audience they would have called up the vulgar world of popular romance (such as Chaucer parodies in Sir Thopas). Certainly they reveal the Dreamer's absurd failure to grasp the truth about the Maiden's position.

Patiently, she explains once more that she is maskelles but not makeles; indeed, she is only one of the Lamb's 144,000 brides. She goes on to attempt an answer to the question 'Quat kyn thyng may be that Lambe?' She does so by quoting the main Scriptural sources for the doctrine of the Lamb of God. The first of these is in Isaiah liii, the passage concerning the 'man of sorrows' on whom the sins of the world were laid, and who 'shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth' (Isaiah liii. 7). She relates this in turn to the second source, John the Baptist's welcoming of Christ as the fulfilment of the prophecy in Isaiah: 'The next day, John saw Jesus coming to him; and he saith: Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who taketh away the sin of the world' (John i. 29). Finally she links these two texts to the Apocalypse, in which the other St John saw the Lamb standing in the midst of the throne of God (Apocalypse v. 6). Thus the poet brings together the three chief Scriptural occurrences of the Lamb: the foreshadowing in Isaiah, the historical event in St John's Gospel, and the heavenly fulfilment in the Apocalypse. The typological pattern is complete, explicitly completed by the poet, rather than left hidden as an allegory.

The Maiden repeats her earlier explanation that, by being married to the Lamb, she is not keeping out anyone else: every day, she says, the Lamb brings in a new supply of brides, and yet they never quarrel with each other. On the contrary, their attitude is 'the more the merrier'; this is the very phrase she uses: 'The mo the myryer, so God me blesse' (850). The down-to-earth colloquialism is no doubt intentionally comic, and it throws a comic light back upon the Dreamer, whose materialism makes it necessary. The Maiden proceeds to quote the Apocalypse to him at some length, to prove that what she says is true, but we need not examine the passage here. Now at last it seems that the Dreamer has grasped that she is only one among many royal brides, but this leads him to think of another question, in which his materialism shows itself once more. He prefaces it with an elaborate complimentary address, very different from his blunt contradictions earlier in the poem. He has understood and accepted the distance between them, and has found a cortays rhetoric appropriate to her grandeur and his lowliness:

'Never the les let be my thonc,'
Quod I, 'My perle, thagh I appose;
I schulde not tempte thy wyt so wlonc,
To Krystez chambre that art ichose.
I am bot mokke and mul among,
And thou so ryche a reken rose,
And bydez here by thys blysful bonc
Ther lyvez lyste may never lose.
Now, hynde, that sympelnesse conez enclose,
I wolde the aske a thynge expresse,
And thagh I be bustwys as a blose,
Let my bone vayl neverthelese.

'Neverthelese cler I you bycalle,
If ye con se hyt be to done;
As thou art gloryous wythouten galle,
Wythnay thou never my ruful bone.'
(901-16)

In this open acknowledgement of his own inferiority the Dreamer achieves a real dignity, but at last he brings out his naïve question. If she is only one of a great company of brides, wherever do they live?

Haf ye no wonez in castel-walle,
Ne maner ther ye may mete and won?
(917-18)

In giving the Dreamer these thoughts of a castle or mansion as possible dwelling-places, the poet is of course following the technique explained earlier: he is making use of the traditional images for heavenly things used in his time, but at the same time, by letting the Dreamer employ them with exaggerated and comic naïveté, he is indicating that they cannot really be taken literally. The Maiden has spoken of Jerusalem, but the Dreamer knows that that is in Judaea, so the brides cannot dwell there, yet their sheer numbers must demand a great city for them to live in:

Thys motelez meyny thou conez of mele,
Of thousandez thryght so gret a route, A gret ceté, for ye arn fele,
Yow byhod have, wythouten doute.
So cumly a pakke of joly juele,
Wer evel don schulde lyy theroute!
(925-30)

One would not be wrong, I think, to detect in those last two lines a delightfully breezy colloquialism, which at the same time conveys the Dreamer's innocently kindly masculine concern at the thought of a crowd of helpless girls sleeping rough.

The Maiden reassures him with her explanation of the existence of two Jerusalems, one earthly and the other heavenly. In answer to his request to see the heavenly city where she dwells, she tells him that 'thurgh gret favor' (968) of the Lamb he may see it from outside, though not from within. There follows the detailed description, closely based on the Apocalypse. This again is a passage we have considered already, with its jewel imagery and brilliant light, and the Dreamer's assurance that his experience would not have been possible 'in the body'. Just as during the earlier long passage based on Scripture (the parable of the vineyard, lines 497 ff.), symbol and drama are here in abeyance. There they gave way to narrative and exposition; here to description. Miss Kean is right, I think, in judging that there is a certain lack of pressure in the poetry of this part of Pearl: 'Necessary as an effective set piece is to the plan of the poem, it does not, in fact, seem to engage the poet's concentrated attention; and he seems to depend on his reader's reaction to the general effect, and to recognition of a familiar context, rather than on his usual technical skill'.²⁰ We found a similar failing (so it appears to a modern reader) in the description of the temple vessels in Purity: a mere collection of details, in which poetry attempts to do the work of painting, and necessarily fails to embody the required significance. Such failures are so common in medieval literature that we can perhaps do no better than to record that we have encountered something that appealed to medieval taste but does not appeal to ours. For medieval poets and their audiences, exhaustive descriptions and lists seem to have had an attraction so great that they often demanded nothing more. A parallel example from a fourteenth-century dream-poem is the list of fourteen varieties of trees in The Parlement of Foules; one from elsewhere in the Gawain-poet's work is the lengthy explanation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight of the various symbolic significances of the pentangle. In none of these cases would we be prepared to call the passage poetry; it is rather an inset into the poem of a different kind of material, highly relevant to its significance but not continuous with it in literary substance. This descriptive passage, however, becomes once more enlivened with drama from the point at which the Dreamer reminds us of his own presence as a witness, so overcome as to be certain that he could not have been 'in the body', and amusingly undignified in his stunned state: 'I stod as stylle as dased quayle' (1085). What follows certainly is poetry. Heralded by the haunting simile of moonrise in daylight comes the procession of virgin-brides, in which the development of the pearl symbolism is taken a stage further, for they are all arrayed like his own pearl:

Depaynt in perlez and wedez qwyte;
In uchonez breste watz bounden boun
The blysful perle wyth gret delyt.
(1102-4)

The Dreamer can now see for himself that they are not jostling for position, as an earthly procession might, and he innocently notes this surprising fact: 'Thagh thay wern fele, no pres in plyt' (1114). At their head is the Lamb himself. In describing the Lamb, the poet does not, as we might expect, allow the Dreamer's naïve vision to make him familiar or homely. On the contrary, he brings out the full exoticism of the Apocalypse, the almost nightmare quality of St John's apprehension of the nature of God. The Lamb, 'Wyth hornez seven of red golde cler' (1111) and pearly-white coat, surrounded by prostrate elders and incense-scattering angels, suggests for the moment the god of a totemistic cult stranger and crueller than Christianity as we usually think of it. Only for the moment, however. This is no cruel beast-god, but one with 'lokez symple, hymself so gent' (1134), and he has in his side the bleeding wound of the crucified Christ. The wound is described with the simplest of alliterative formulas, 'wyde and weete' (1135)²¹—it is an ordinary wound, gaping and messy—and it arouses in the Dreamer a touchingly simple compassion and incredulity that anyone could have been so cruel as to cause it. It is as if he were feeling the reality of Christ's sufferings for the first time:

Bot a wounde ful wyde and weete con wyse
Anende hys herte, thurgh hyde torente.
Of hys quyte syde his blod outsprent.
Alas, thoght I, who did that spyt?
Ani breste for bale aght haf forbrent
Er he therto hade had delyt.
(1135-40)²²

The mixture of feelings aroused by this description of the Lamb and his procession has, I find, an extraordinarily disturbing power: squalor in majesty, pain in triumph. Already disturbed by this, the Dreamer is still more agitated by the sight of his 'lyttel quene' (1147) among the virgin-brides. All that he has learned about the necessary distance between them is overwhelmed by 'luf-longyng' (1152), and he makes his ill-fated attempt to cross the stream.

This attempt, as the Dreamer ought to have recognized before making it, is displeasing to God—'Hit watz not at my Pryncez paye' (1164)—and in consequence 'That braththe out of my drem me brayde' (1170). He is suddenly returned to the waking world, to the garden and pearl of the poem's opening:

Then wakned I in that erber wlonk;
My hede upon that hylle watz layde
Ther as my perle to grounde strayd.
(1171-3)

He has shown the sin of Jonah, impatience, and he ruefully reflects that if he had submitted to the will of God he might have seen more of his secrets:

To that Pryncez paye hade I ay bente,
And yerned no more then watz me gyven,
And halden me ther in trwe entent,
As the perle me prayed that watz so thryven,
As helde, drawn to Goddez present,
To mo of his mysterys I hade ben dryven.
(1189-94)

The moral he draws is entirely in keeping with Patience:

Lorde, mad hit arn that agayn the stryven,
Other proferen the oght agayn thy paye.
(1199-1200)

But the situation is more complex than at the end of Patience. The 'hero' of Patience is 'he', and there is no sign that Jonah has learned anything from his experience: the moral is for us. But the 'hero' of Pearl is 'I', and the Dreamer has learned something himself, as well as providing an exemplum for us. The dream-experience has not been wasted on him, for the moral he draws from it also applies to the rebellious feelings he had been displaying at the beginning of the poem towards the loss of his pearl. Now, assured by his vision that she is not really lost, but is one of the circle of the blessed, he is able to win through to acceptance of her death and even, through seeing how happy her state now is, to rejoicing at it:

If hit be veray and soth sermoun
That thou so stykez in garlande gay,
So wel is me in thys doel-doungoun
That thou art to that Prynsez paye.
(1185-8)

The Dreamer has been changed by his dream, yet we feel the change to be precarious—as precarious, say, as the change brought about at the end of The Tempest. It will always be possible to return from the end of the poem to its beginning, and to start the wheel revolving once more. But for the moment a genuine change of attitude has occurred, and it is not implausibly extreme. The Dreamer still finds the world a 'doel-doungoun', but he can now recognize his own impatience, and is ready to commit his pearl voluntarily into the hands of God:

And sythen to God I hit bytaghte,
In Krystez dere blessyng and myn.
(1207-8)

One question remains to be considered: does the poem tell us anything about the nature of the further mysterys that the Dreamer might have seen if he had not been impatient and tried to cross the river? It is of the essence of Pearl that, through the Dreamer's imperfection, the visionary experience should remain incomplete, and indeed, if the poem is to remain a poem, it has to break off short of any closer approach to the ineffable. But the necessary sense of incompleteness, by which the Dreamer is made miserable at the end—

Me payed ful ille to be outfleme
So sodenly of that fayre regioun,
Fro alle tho syghtez so quyke and queme.
A longeyng hevy me strok in swone …
(1177-80)

—could be conveyed to us all the more fully if we had some hint of what further illumination he had lost. I believe that the poem does offer such a hint, and that the clue to it is found once more in the development of the pearl symbolism. A final and incomplete stage in this development has been taking place during the long passage based on the Apocalypse. The qualities of the pearl have been gradually extended, as we have seen, to include the other world of the dream, the kingdom of heaven and the new Jerusalem, which had

 uch yate of a margyrye,
A parfyt perle that never fatez.
(1037-8)

But in particular there are suggestions that the Lamb of God too can be seen as an aspect of the poem's central symbol (or rather that the pearl can be seen as a reflection of the Lamb). In answering the Dreamer's question 'Quat kyn thyng may be that Lambe?' (771), the Maiden has referred to Christ as 'My Lombe, my Lorde, my dere juelle' (795). Juelle is a term which has previously been applied to the Maiden herself—

That juel thenne in gemmez gente
(253)

A juel to me then watz thy s geste,
And juelez wern hyr gentyl sawez
(277-8)

—and it is later applied once more to the Lamb, whose followers 'Al songe to love that gay juelle' (1124). Other key qualities of the pearl are also found in him. He is white and spotless:

Thys Jerusalem Lombe hade never pechche
Of other huee bot quyt jolyf
That mot ne masklle moght on streche,
For wolle quyte so ronk and ryf;
(841-4)

The Lompe ther wythouten spottez blake.
(945)

Finally, when the Dreamer actually sees the Lamb for the first time he sees this whiteness as explicitly pearl-like; 'As praysed perlez his wedez wasse' (1112). We seem to have here the briefest glimpse of a potential culmination of the visionary experience, by which the Lamb and the pearl would be identified, and the Dreamer would see in the precious stone the ground of its own preciousness; or, to put it differently, would recognize in the human soul the image of God. Such a perception would belong to mystical experience, however, and, as I have argued earlier, though the Gawain-poet probably knew the devotional writings of his time, he neither was nor supposed himself to be a mystic. Still less is his Dreamer a mystic; but I think it likely that, in the potential identification of Lamb and pearl (similar to, but higher than, the achieved identification of pearl and rose), the poet hinted at a culmination from which the Dreamer was excluded.

Notes

1. This point is forcefully made by A. R. Heiserman, 'The Plot of Pearl' PMLA, LXXX (1965), 164-71.
2. 'Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in The Pearl', p. 588.
3. Schofield, ibid. pp. 589 ff.; Gordon, ed. Pearl, note on lines 1-4, p. 45.
4. Cf. M. W. Bloomfield, 'A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory', MP, LX (1962-3), 161-71: 'One might say that languages with grammatical gender, unlike [modern] English, have automatically built-in personification of some sort' (p. 162).
5. For this literary convention, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 183-202.
6. C. A. Luttrell, 'Pearl: Symbolism in a Garden Setting', Neophilologus, XLIX (1965), 160-76, points out that the 'harvest-time and August opening' is by no means unique: there is an example in Nicole de Margival's Panthere d'Amors. It remains unusual, however. For suggestions as to the possible symbolic associations of the season, see Gollancz, ed. Pearl, pp. 118-19 (Lammas); C. G. Osgood, ed. Pearl (Boston, Mass., 1906), p. xvi (Assumption of the Virgin); Schofield, 'Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in The Pearl', p. 616, n. 2 (St. John's Great Reaper); Kean, pp. 48-52 (cycle of seasons connected with Passion and Resurrection, and with sin and regeneration). Miss Kean also considers the possible symbolism of flowers at some length (p. 59-70). As is usual with scholarly discussions of medieval symbolism, the scholars disagree so thoroughly among themselves that they can scarcely be said to clarify the poem for us, or even to convince us that there was any generally accepted system of symbols in the poet's own time, on which he was drawing. August could perhaps 'mean' almost as as many different things in the fourteenth century as it can today; and we are left with the poem.
7. See Gordon, ed. Pearl, p. xxxiv and note on line 228.
8. Hillmann, ed. The Pearl, p. xx.
9. Gordon, ed. Pearl, p. xiii.
10. Miss Kean appears to take it that 'in this dene' means 'on earth', and that the Dreamer 'had believed that she was on earth' (Kean, p. 128). But if this were so, why should the Maiden not explain that she is not on earth, rather than (as she does) that she is where she is not because he can see her, but because that was God's promise? Miss Kean asserts that 'As the Maiden points out, she is not, in fact, in the country in which he thinks she is' (p. 129), but without giving any line-reference. There is no equivalent in Pearl to the statement of Beatrice in the Paradiso which Miss Kean quotes as a parallel: "Tu non se' in terra, sì come tu credi."
11. D.S. Brewer, 'Courtesy and the Gawain-Poet', p. 59.
12. Ed. Phyllis Hodgson, p. 105.
13. On legal terminology in Pearl, see Kean, pp. 185 ff.
14. There is a discrepancy in the line-numbering here, because Gordon and other editors assume that a line has accidentally been omitted from the manuscript between greve and Thyself.
15. I think this a more plausible interpretation of the lines than A. L. Kellogg's suggestion (Traditio, XII [1956], 406-7) that they allude to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, for this would not explain thef or cler (cf. 'a clear profit').
16. For example, Sister Hillmann, ed. The Pearl; W. S. Johnson, 'The Imagery and Diction of The Pearl', ELH, XX (1953), 161-80: 'The result is an emphasis upon a ubiquitous sense of contrast between the nature of heaven and the nature of earth, the revelation of which seems, for our present reading, to be the poem's main purpose' (p. 163); and S. de Voren Hoffman, 'The Pearl: Notes for an Interpretation', MP, LVIII (1960-1), 73-80: 'in the poem we find together several meanings of the pearl figure and … they are kept distinct' (p. 76).
17. Dorothy Everett, Essays on Middle English Literature, p. 93.
18. English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, 1932), p. 140.
19. See the detailed discussion of styf in Borroff, pp. 79-81.
20. Kean, p. 215.
21. Cf. The Destruction of Troy, ed. Panton and Donaldson, 'wyde woundes and wete' (1329); York Mystery Plays, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 'woundes wete' (p. 406, line 200 and p. 411, line 283) (these are Christ's wounds).
22. Miss Kean (p. 210) notes the 'prosaic terms' in which the wound is described, and compares the Dreamer's reaction, which she sees as 'lack of comprehension', with that of the Chaucerian Dreamer in The Book of the Duchess to the news that the man in black's lady is dead. She remarks; 'What is appropriate to a courtly poem addressed to a patron, seems oddly at variance with a moment which, we feel, would normally call for a much higher emotional tension.' It is true that 'the glimpse of the New Jerusalem and its triumphant host cannot be a personal triumph for the Dreamer' (p. 211), but I think Miss Kean underrates the emotional charge that can be carried by simple language. To see and feel for the first time the reality of Christ's suffering, and to see that suffering as borne at the very heart of triumph, is to achieve illumination (admittedly not of an advanced kind), not misunderstanding.