[In the following essay, Moorman defines the poem's real subject as the narrator's mind: the stages of his conversation with the Pearl maiden represent stages leading to his personal redemption and acceptance of his situation.]

It is decidedly not the intention of this paper to introduce a radically new interpretation of the Middle English Pearl, a poem which has already been done almost to death by its interpreters. The criticism already devoted to the poem contains judgments as to its meaning and purpose so varied and, at times, so downright contradictory that Pearl is in danger of becoming a scholarly free-for-all, another "Who was Homer?" or "Why did Hamlet delay?" The disputed question in Pearl is, of course, "What is the pearl-maiden?" So far it has been suggested that she is the poet's daughter,¹ clean maidenhood,² the Eucharist,³ innocence,⁴ the lost sweetness of God,⁵ the Blessed Virgin,⁶ heaven itself,⁷ and a literary fiction functioning only as an introduction to theological debate.⁸ Such interest in the figure of the girl and in the peripheral aspects of source and imagery is understandable. A poem containing possible allusions to the Roman de la rose, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Dante, and the Vulgate and utilizing possibly heretical theology, the medieval dream-vision, the elegy, and the débat is a critic's land of heart's desire. However, such interpretive scholarship, while undeniably of great interest and value in opening up new avenues of critical insight, is nevertheless fragmentary, in that it is all too seldom directed, except in the most parenthetical manner, toward exploring the total meaning of the poem. We become easily lost in exploring the technicalities of the theology, the possible levels of symbolism in the maiden, and the details of the vision of the New Jerusalem and so are content to leave the center of the poem untouched or to murmur that its theme is obvious and pass on.

I would suggest that the quickest way to come to the heart of the poem would be to waive entirely all questions of allegory and symbolism and to concentrate not upon the figure of the girl but upon that of the narrator. For whatever else the poem may be—dream-vision, elegy, allegory, debate—it is, first of all, a fiction presented from a clearly defined and wholly consistent point of view; we accompany the "I" of the poem through his vision, and it is through his eyes that we see the magical landscapes and the girl. In the terms of Henry James, the narrator-poet is the "central intelligence" of the poem; in those of Brooks and Warren, the poem is the "narrator's story," in that we are never allowed to see and judge the experience presented by the poem objectively and for ourselves but are, instead, forced, by the point of view which the poet adopts, to accept the experience of the vision only in terms of its relationship to him. The mind of the narrator in Pearl, like the mind of Strether in The Ambassadors or, to come closer home, the mind of Dante the voyager, is the real subject under consideration. It is with the figure of the narrator alone in an "erbere" [arbor] that the poem begins and ends; it is he who controls the argument with the pearl-maiden by introducing the subjects for debate and by directing the path of the discussion with his questions; it is for his benefit that the maiden relates the parable of the vineyard and allows him to view the New Jerusalem.

The girl—to most critics the center of attraction simply because of her enigmatic and apparently shifting nature—is not introduced until line 161 and does not become actively engaged in the poem until line 241, when she is addressed by the narrator. She then disappears at line 976, to appear only once thereafter in a single reference within the vision of the New Jerusalem. In a poem of 1,212 lines, the girl herself is present on the scene for only 815 lines and can be said to participate in the action for only 735 lines, a little over half the length of the poem. Moreover, the pearl-maiden cannot be said to function, except peripherally, in the narrative movement of the poem. During that middle section of the poem which she seems to dominate by her presence, the poet never allows us to lose our sense of the narrator's presence. We know that he is there and listening carefully, interjecting questions and remarks from time to time. We are constantly aware of the fact that it is for his benefit that the girl talks and that it is his consciousness which is directly affected by her remarks. In short, the poet has so constructed the poem that it becomes obligatory that the reader judge the figure of the pearl-maiden not in isolation but entirely in terms of her relation to the narrator, the "I," the central intelligence of the poem.

The effect of this fact upon interpretation would seem to be twofold. First, it forces the reader to regard the action of the poem within the implied dramatic framework which the poet provides, and, second, it requires the reader to fit into that framework all the details, however seemingly unrelated, which the poet introduces—most significantly, the parable of the vineyard, the debate over grace and merit and the ensuing description of the place of the innocent in the heavenly hierarchy, the girl's description of her life in the New Jersualem, and the vision of the New Jerusalem which is given to the poet.

The poem begins with a direct statement by the poet-narrator that he has lost "in on erbere"⁹ [in an arbor] a certain pearl of great value, one which is to him without peer in all the world. He is so terribly grieved by the loss of the pearl that he cannot forget his former delight in possessing the gem; he laments his loss, "wyschande þat wele, / Þat wont watƷ whyle deuoyde [his] wrange / And heuen [his] happe and al [his] hele" [wishing that happiness / That once (him) freed from care / And restored (his) hap and all (his) joy] (14-16). But his grief takes another form also: it brings into his mind a series of paradoxes concerning the relationship of beauty and death or, more specifically, of growth and death. He knows that he sang "neuer so swete a sange" [never so sweet a song] (19) as that which he sings now in his hour of deepest grief; he reflects that the pearl's presence in the earth of the arbor will cause "blomeƷ blayke and blwe and rede" [golden and blue and red blossoms] (27) to prosper over her grave; he knows that "vch gresse mot grow of grayneƷ dede" [each blade must grow from dead seed] (31). In short, the narrator's grief-stricken statements reflect more than personal sorrow over the loss of the pearl. In his grief he begins to consider the paradoxical nature of the universe in which he lives, a universe in which the decay of the body contributes directly to the beauty of nature, where "Flor and fryte may not be fede / Þer hit doun drof in moldeƷ dunne" [flowers and fruit may not fail where this pearl dropped down into dark earth] (29-30). Like Shelley in "Adonais," he wonders how

The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit
  tender,
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes
 beneath.

Having established the narrator's grief and, more importantly, this questioning of the nature and justice of the universe which his grief inspires, the poet goes on to begin the dramatic movement of the poem. The narrator states that he has come to "þat spot" (49) where he lost the pearl; he has come there, moreover, in the very midst of August, when all growing things have blossomed, when the corn must be cut and the flowers—gillyflowers, ginger, gromwells, and peonies—are "schyre and schene" [bright and shining] (42). Here, in the midst of joy, his sorrow becomes even more acute, and in spite both of "resoun," which offers only the most temporary relief to his "deuely dele" [dreadful care] (51), and of the "kynde of Kryst," his "wreched wylle in wo ay wraƷte" [nature of Christ], [wretched will in woe was caught] (56). It is in this mood that the vision begins.

Thus in the first section of the poem we are introduced, even before we know that the poem is to take the form of a vision, to two facts about the situation of the narrator. First, we learn that he is overcome with inconsolable grief, and from the allusion to the "huyle" [mound] (41) we judge that the poet is grieving the death of a loved one. Second, we learn that his grief has taken the form of an awareness, almost of an indictment, of the mixed nature of the world. Standing amid the joyful flowers of August, he can think only of death and of the fact that the rotting body of his beloved child, "so clad in clot" [clothed in clay] (22), has produced this profusion of color. The two are so connected in the mind of the narrator, moreover, that his last thoughts upon going to sleep are of his own "wreched wylle" and, paradoxically, of the fragrance which springs into his senses as he falls asleep. In short, the poet's immediate grief has developed at the very beginning of the poem into a pondering of universal problems of life and death.

This questioning of the nature of things introduced at the outset is to occupy the poet throughout the poem. In order to assuage his grief, the poet must thus accomplish complish a reconciliation of the apparently dual nature of heavenly justice. And it is precisely this struggle for understanding which gives the poem its permanence and its enduring appeal. We are seldom, if ever, satisfied with the purely occasional poem, and the elegy which records only a particular grief never becomes in any way meaningful to us. In the elegy, moreover, the poet's grief is made universal and thus meaningful by exactly the process we see at work here in Pearl. The reader's attention is directed by the elegiac poet not toward the figure of the deceased, but toward the poet's own struggle to accept his loss and, more importantly, toward his struggle to understand in universal terms the final meaning of death and the conditions under which death may be meaningful to him. In "Lycidas," we remember, we are not allowed to become interested in the figure of Edward King. Our attention instead is focused from the beginning upon the struggle of the young Milton, first, to accept the possibility of his own premature death and, second, to understand, in both personal and universal terms, the significance of King's death. Likewise, in "In Memoriam" the figure of Arthur Hallam moves out of our consciousness as Tennyson explores the terms upon which he can accept a traditional faith in a skeptical age. "Adonais" and "Thyrsis" are more concerned with the struggles of the living Shelley and the living Arnold than with the praises of the dead Keats and the dead Clough.

And so it is with Pearl. The first section of the poem introduces the poet's struggle to reconcile the apparent contradiction expressed for him in the contrast of the flowers and the corpse; stanzas 2-5 introduce the means whereby he can approach a resolution of that contradiction. From the side of the grave his "spyryt per sprang in space" [spirit leapt through space] (61), and his body "on balke þer bod in sweuen" [remained in a dream on the mound] (62). He finds himself in a strange world, far removed from the familiar earthly garden where he fell asleep; he "ne wyste in þis worlde quere þat hit wace" [new not in this world where it was] (65). He sees about him the items of the natural world—cliffs, forests, trees; but here these familiar sights are transformed into strange shapes and materials: crystal cliffs, forests filled with "rych rokkeƷz" (68), silver leaves, and pearls scattered about as gravel. This is the Earthly Paradise, where the ordinary natural objects of earth are displayed within and altered by a supernatural context. As Wendell Stacy Johnson points out, the images of the garden here reflect a brightness and light coming from outside themselves.¹⁰

Yet even this vision is not the ultimate perfection. Across the stream by which he walks lies the Heavenly Paradise, the complete antithesis of earth. The images pass here from "the vision of nature arrayed in (reflecting) light to one of a land and a person [the pearl-maiden] set in gems and adorned by an 'inner' lightness."¹¹ Both gardens, however, have a recuperative effect upon the narrator; the first "Bylde in [him] blys, abated [his] baleƷ, / Fordidden [his] stresse, dystryed [his] payneƷ" [increased (his) joy, relieved (his) sorrow, / Allayed (his) distress, destroyed (his) pain] (123-124). But the second paradise, that which lies across the stream, seems even more wonderful to him; there, he feels, lies the answer to his dilemma:

Forþy I ÞoƷt þat Paradyse
WatƷ þer ouer gayn þo bonkeƷ brade.
I hoped þe water were a deuyse
Bytwene myrþeƷ by mereƷ made;
ByƷonde þe broke, by slente oþer slade,
I hoped þat mote merked wore.
(137-142)

[Indeed I thought that Paradise
Beyond broad banks lay there displayed.
I thought the stream to be a ruse,
Between two joys a boundary made;
Beyond the stream, on slope, in dell,
I thought to see the City laid.]

But the water is deep, and, in spite of his longing, the narrator cannot cross.

The narrator has now reached a position midway between earth, with its unsolvable riddles of life and death, and heaven, where all contradictories are united. In mythical terms, the narrator has arrived at a testing point; he is midway in the hero's mythical initiation cycle from earth to the strange land of adventure to earth again. Having accomplished the necessary journey to a strange land, having accepted the "call to adventure,"¹² he finds his mind "radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life patterns of the stage left behind [his normal earthly life]."¹³ In the more familiar terms of Arnold Toynbee, the narrator has accomplished a "withdrawal" from society which "makes it possible for the personality to realize powers within himself which might have remained dormant if he had not been released for the time being from his social toils and trammels."¹⁴ Within the context of the poem, the narrator is at a point midway between problem (the apparently paradoxical nature of death) and solution (the resolving of that paradox). His world has become neither earth nor heaven but a middle ground, where earth and heaven can, under certain conditions as in the dream-vision, meet. In the midst of his wonderment, just as he is about to attempt a crossing, he sees before him, on the other side of the stream, the lost pearl, and at this point the debate begins.

What I have just called the "debate," which is to say simply the conversation between the narrator and the pearl-maiden, falls conveniently, as I have implied, into four parts: (1) the parable of the vineyard, (2) the girl's discussion of the relative grounds of grace and merit as means of salvation and her ensuing explanation of the place of the innocent in the heavenly hierarchy, (3) her description of Our Lord's suffering in the Old Jerusalem and of her life with him in the New Jerusalem, and (4) the vision of the New Jerusalem. I would claim that these episodes in the discussion are not digressions used either for their own sakes or for purposes of general instruction but that they are well-defined and climactically arranged stages in the process by which the narrator is made to understand the meaning of the girl's death and so is freed from the burden of his grief. It is my general thesis here that the long debate between the narrator and the girl is the only means by which the narrator can resolve the paradox of beauty and decay, of growth and death, which has troubled him and, by that resolution, come to accept the death of his daughter. For it becomes quite clear in the course of the conversation between the living narrator-poet and the dead maiden that their differences are profound. He is a man, she an angel, and the nature of the stream that divides them and the function of the vision itself become clear within the context of those differences. Earth cannot receive her; he is not ready for heaven. The debate in which they engage thus becomes a contest between two points of view, the earthly and the heavenly, between a point of view which sees natural death only as an irreducible paradox of decay and growth and a point of view which can reconcile that paradox in terms of a higher unity. Thus the terms of the central episode of the debate—grace and merit—are of no great consequence in themselves but have meaning within the dramatic framework of the poem only as they relate to the attitudes which they serve to reveal in the course of the talk.

Wendell Stacy Johnson has already shown, by means of a careful study of the imagery of the poem, that Pearl involves "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 [Johnson's] present reading, to be the poem's main purpose."¹⁵ I would agree with Johnson's demonstration of the contrast between earthly values and heavenly values, but this contrast seems to me to constitute only the means used by the poet to attain a yet higher end. The poet's earthbound nature, which we, as readers, share and which causes him to balk and quibble at each of her explanations, is in reality the source of his discontent. The girl's purpose in the debate is thus not primarily to prove to him the theological validity of the saving doctrine of grace but to demonstrate to him a point of view which will allow him to accept the differences in their attitudes and, through this acceptance, to come to a realization of the meaning and purpose of her death. To show the successful resolution of the two points of view exhibited in the poem and, through this resolution, the concomitant acceptance by the narrator of the fact of death thus becomes the main purpose and theme of the poem.

It remains to chart briefly the progress of the argument. The narrator—who, we remember, is the central intelligence and thus, in a sense, the reader—begins with the most natural of questions, a question which stems from his own interrogation of the justness of God and from his earthbound point of view:

"O perle," quod I, "in perleƷ pyƷt,
Art þou my perle þat I haf playned,
Regretted by myn one on nyƷte?
Much longenyg haf I for þe layned,
Syþen into gresse þou me aglyƷte.
Pensyf, payred, I am forpayned,
And þou in a lyf of lykyng IyƷte,
In Paradys erde, of stryf vnstrayned.
What wyrde hatƷ hyder my iuel vayned,
And don me in þys del and gret daunger?"
(241-250)

["O Pearl," I said, "in pearls bedight,
Are you the pearl that I have mourned
And grieved for by myself at night?
By grief for you have I been torn
Since into grass you slipped away.
Pensive and careworn, I have grieved,
While you enjoy a life of play
In Paradise from strife relieved.
What fate has there my jewel placed
And left to me this pain and care?"]

If both the tone and substance of his question reveal his earthly point of view, both the tone and substance of the pearlmaiden's answer reveal the gulf between them:

"Sir, Ʒe haf your tale mysetente,
To say your perle is al awaye,
Þat is in cofer so comly clente
As in þis gardyn gracios gaye,
Hereinne to lenge for euer and play,
Þer mys nee mornyng com neuer nere.
Her were a forser for þe, in faye,
If þou were a gentyl jueler."
(257-264)

[Sir, you have your tale mistold,
To say your pearl was snatched away,
Since now she lies in royal state
In this fair garden sweet and gay,
Herein to dwell in constant joy
With loss and mourning never near.
Here might you see a treasured tomb
If you were a gentle jeweler.]

As E. V. Gordon has said, "In the manner of the maiden is portrayed the effect upon a clear intelligence of the persistent earthliness of the father's mind: all is revealed to him, and he has eyes, yet he cannot see."¹⁶

The narrator, as quick to be comforted here by the girl's answer as he was by his first glimpse of the earthly paradise, suggests that he join her by crossing the stream. She replies, as of course she must, that he is "madde" (290). The narrator, at this point, though professing to understand the blessed state of the girl, quite obviously can interpret their relationship only in the familiar terms of earth, a sort of relationship which to her can no longer exist. He is human, he has our sympathy, but he is still completely dominated by earthly standards. The pearl-maiden must thus rebuke him, reminding him of his status as a living man:

"Deme now þyself if þou con dayly
As man to God wordeƷ schulde heue.
Þou saytƷ þou schal won in þis bayly;
Me þynk þe burde fyrst aske leue,
And Ʒet of graunt þou myƷteƷ fayle."
(313-317)

[Judge now yourself if you have said
Those words to God you daily ought.
You think this land to be your own;
I think permission should be sought
Even though that gift might be denied.]

The first section of the argument, a sort of prelude to the debate proper, thus establishes the nature of the differences between the narrator and the maiden. He asks pity; she demands full understanding. Neither can grant the other's request or acknowledge the other's point of view.

Then the narrator, in the course of blaming the girl for her happiness at his expense ("In blysse I se þe bly þely blent, / And I a man al mornyf mate; / Ʒe take þeron ful lyttel tente, / ÞaƷ I hente ofte harmeƷ hate" [In joy I see you blithely blent, / And I a man by mourning dazed; / You take thereof full little heed / That I am oft by sorrow razed] [385-388]), questions her right to the high place which she holds in the heavenly hierarchy; if she is

… quen þat watƷ so Ʒonge.
What more honour moƷte he acheue
Þat hade endured in worlde stronge,
And lyued in penaunce hys lyueƷ longe
Wyth bodyly bale hym blysse to byye?
(474.478)

[ … queen while yet so young,
What greater honor might he achieve
Who had endured this world's distress,
And lived in penance all his life
To buy by pain true happiness?]

She lived, he says, for only two years; she never learned how to pray, knew neither "Pater ne Crede" [the Our Father nor the Creed]. Her position is thus to the narrator "to dere a date" [too great a reward] (492). It is at this point in her explanation that the girl replies to the narrator's objections with the parable of the vine-yard, in which first and last are paid alike, and she ends her telling of the story with an assertion which serves, significantly at this point, to emphasize the differences between the points of view which separate father and daughter:

More haf I of ioye and blysse hereinne,
Of ladyschyp gret and lyueƷ blom,
Þen alle  þe wyƷeƷ in Þe worlde myƷt wynne
By þe way of ryƷt to aske dome.
(577-580)

[More have I of joy and bliss herein,
Of ladyship true and honor's height
Than all men in the world might win
Who sought reward by way of right.]

But, at this stage of the poem, the narrator, relying wholly upon his earthly standard of value, cannot begin to accept such a departure from what he considers true justice, and he, matching her appeal to biblical authority with his own, tells her that her tale is "vnresounable" (590). Thus her first attempt at conversion fails, since the narrator refuses to acknowledge, or even to recognize, her point of view and instead continues to advance earthly standards in opposition to her.

The maiden, however, pursues her case by the only means left open to her, by explaining carefully and in detail the relationship between grace and merit and the place of the innocent, "saf by ryƷt" [safe by right] (684), in heaven in order to assert that the grace of God is "gret inoghe" (612) to overcome earthly difficulties and standards of justice based entirely upon merit and "gret inoghe" to allot to each a full share of heavenly grace. Moreover, toward the end of her description of the place of the innocent in heaven, which concludes the second main episode of the debate, the maiden sharply underlines her point in continuing the debate thus far. She says:

HarmleƷ, trwe, and vndefylde,
Wythouten mote oþer mascle of sulpande
 synne,
Quen such þer cnoken on þe bylde,
Tyt schal hem men þe Ʒate vnpynne.
Þer is þe blys þat con not blynne
Þat þe jueler soƷte burƷ perré pres,
And solde alle hys goud, boþe wolen and
 lynne,
To bye hym a perle watƷ mascelleƷ.
(725-732)

[The innocent, true, and undefiled
By spot or stain of filthy sin,

When these come knocking at the door
The warders quick the gate unpin.
Within is the joy that never fails,
Which the jeweler thought in gems to catch
And sold his goods, linens and wool,
To buy him a pearl without a match.]

And she ends her speech by admonishing her father to forsake his earthly standards:

I rede þe forsake þe worlde wode
And porchace þy perle maskelles.
(743-744)

[I bid you forsake this madding world
And purchase this pearl without a match.]

The point of her remark, occurring as it does at the end of her attempt to explain to him heavenly standards of justice, is that the difference in standards between heaven and earth is such that the achieving of the pearl (here plainly symbolizing beatitude) demands a complete renunciation of wealth and hence earthly standards of wealth. That the narrator is beginning to see the point of the girl's remarks is evident in that, for the first time in the poem, he himself seems to perceive the nature and width of the river which separates them:

O maskeleƷ perle in perlez pure,
Quo formed þe þy fayre fygure?

Þy beauté com neuer of nature;
Pymalyon paynted neuer þy vys,
Ne Arystotel nawþer by his lettrure
Of carped þe kynde þese propertéƷ.
Þy colour passeƷ þe flour-de-lys;
Þyn angel-hauyng so clene corteƷ.
(745-754)

[O matchless Pearl arrayed in pearls
Who framed for you your figure's grace?

Your grace springs not from natural source
Nor did Pygmalion paint your matchless face.
Aristotle did not in all his works
Include your gentle properties,
Your color surpassing fleur-de-lis,
Your heaven-sent pure courtesy.]

Gordon, in his edition of the poem, notes of these lines that they are reminiscent of a passage in the Roman de la rose "where it is argued that neither the 'philosopher' … nor the artist, not even Pygmalion, can imitate successfully the works of Nature."¹⁷ But this is plainly not the function of the comparison in this context. The narrator here would seem to realize for the first time the fact that the maiden before him is no longer the girl he knew on earth as his daughter. Her beauty is a new, an unnatural, beauty; her face and color derive from supernatural sources and from a realm of experience which even Aristotle, who catalogued all the forms of natural things, left untouched. Thus the parable of the vineyard and the discussion of grace and merit and of the place of the innocent in heaven are by no means digressive in character; they are integral to the movement and purpose of the poem as the first steps in the process whereby the poet-narrator comes to understand, or if not to understand, at least to accept, the heavenly point of view which the pearl-maiden represents.

But in spite of this sudden revelation of the central meaning of the maiden's speech, the narrator cannot as yet apply to his own situation the lesson he has apparently learned. For at the maiden's statement that Christ has "pyƷt [her] in perleƷ maskelleƷ" [robed (her) in matchless pearls] (768), he reiterates his argument that she is unworthy to surpass those women who "For Kryst han lyued in much stryf' [lived for Christ in sore distress] (776) and so, in effect, reopens the discussion.

The maiden's third attempt to assauge the poet's grief by explaining to him the differences in attitude which separate them takes the form of a description of Christ's sufferings in the Old Jerusalem and of her life in the New Jerusalem. Again, her point is the same, that heavenly standards are not earthly standards, but this time she deals directly with the paradox which lies at the root of the narrator's difficulty:

AlþaƷ oure corses in clotteƷ clynge,
And Ʒe remen for rauþe wythouten reste,
We þourƷoutly hauen cnawyng;
Of on dethe fill oure hope is drest.
Þe Lombe vus gladeƷ, oure care is kest.…
(857-861)

[Although our corpses lie in graves
And you in grief remain alive,
We still have knowledge sure enough
That from one death our hopes derive.
The Lamb us gladdens, our cares are gone …]

Upon hearing this statement, the narrator comes closer than before to a true and lasting understanding of their differences:

I am bot mokke and mul among,
And þou so ryche a reken rose,
And bydeƷ here by þys blysful bonc
Þer IyueƷ lyste may neuer lose.
(905-908)

[I am but muck and mold indeed
And you a rich and noble rose,
Who on this blissful shore reside
And never may life's savor lose.]

He realizes, in short, that his world of "mokke and mul" is forever separate from the world "by þys blysful bonc." Yet, for one last time, he cannot resist asking a favor; he would see the New Jerusalem himself. The reasons for his asking such a question again stem from his earthly point of view. He has looked about on the other side of the stream and has seen no hint of "castel-walle, / Ne maner þer [the girl] may mete and won" [a castle wall, / Nor manor where (the girl) might dwell] (917-918). He has seen only "þyse holteƷ" [these groves] (921), and he knows with all the dogmatic surety of earth that Jerusalem is really "in Judee" (922). It is the most natural of questions for him. He has come, by now, largely to accept the girl's point; he realizes that out of "mokke and mul" may come a "reken rose" and that even though the mysteries of heaven are forever incomprehensible to man, yet death, even his daughter's death, has a place in the divine plan, however unknowable it may be. As yet, he is still a man, and seeing is, after all, believing. And so the vision follows.

The vision, the final step in the process by which the poet comes to understand the meaning of death, involves, as did the parable of the vineyard, the debate on grace and merit, and the description of life in heaven, the distinction between earthly and heavenly standards of value. Here, in the New Jerusalem, the separation is complete; there is no need of earthly light or even of earthly religious forms:

Sunne ne mone schon neuer so swete
As þat foysoun flode out of þat flet;
Swyþe hit swange þurƷ vch a strete
Wythouten fylþe oþer galle oþer glet.
Kyrk þerinne watƷ non Ʒete,
Chapel ne temple þat euer watƷ set;
Þe AlmyƷty watƷ her mynster mete,
Þe Lombe þe sakerfyse þer to refet.
(1057-1064)

[Sun nor moon shone never so sweet
As that fair flood flowed from the throne;
Swiftly it poured through every street,
Unchecked by filth or scum or stone.
No church was ever built therein,
No crypt, no temple ever set;
Almighty God was church enough,
The Lamb their sacrifice complete.]

The climax of the vision, and of the poem, comes when the poet perceives, with his own eyes, his "lyttel quene" (1147) sitting among her peers, happy and again "wyth lyf ' (1146), though a different kind of life from that he had first wished for her. And at this vision of an existence forever separate from earth, all his doubts disappear. In an ecstasy, he wishes to cross over to her but is awakened from his dream and finds himself again in the garden, his head upon the grave.

It is significant that the narrator's first words upon awakening show his single-hearted devotion to Christ. "Now al be to þat PrynceƷ paye" [Now all be to that Prince's joy] (1176), he says, and we are to understand, I think, that all doubts, all challenges, all questionings, have been removed from him. He realizes his own unworthiness to enter as yet into the heavenly life, his own incapacity to know finally the mysteries of the universe. But through a rite de passage, he has journeyed to the strange land and has returned, having been initiated into a new and more meaningful life. He will thus accept the standards of God, for the most part without understanding but also without questioning. It is enough for him; "wel is me," he says, "in þys doel-doungoun / Þat þou art to þat Prynseþ paye" [well for me … in this dungeon of sorrow / since you are that Prince's joy.] (1187-1188). The poem thus ends with the narrator's lamenting, not, as before, the death of his daughter and the corruption of her body, but the corruptness of his own soul which has kept him from her and with his prayer that he may himself eventually be counted among the lowly servants and "precious perleƷ" of God.

The theme and the poetic method of Pearl are thus the theme and the poetic method of most elegies, the acceptance, through suffering and revelation, of death as a part of the universal plan. In Pearl, the parts of the dream-vision become the stages of redemption. The narrator here comes to learn, through a series of trials, to accept his place among the living. Like Milton's Adam, he can be said to say:

Greatly instructed I shall hence depart,
Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill
Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain;
Beyond which was my folly to aspire.
Henceforth I learn that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God.

Notes

1. See the commentaries in the editions of the poem by R. Morris (London, 1864); I. Gollancz (London, 1891); and C. G. Osgood (Boston, 1906); and especially G. G. Coulton's defense of the autobiographical basis of the poem in MLR, II (1906), 39-43.
2. W. H. Schofield, "The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl" PMLA, XIX (1904), 154-215, and "Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in The Pearl," ibid., XXTV (1909), 585-675.
3. R. M. Garrett, "The Pearl": An Interpretation ("University of Washington Publications in English," Vol. IV, No. 1 [Seattle, 1918]).
4. See Jefferson B. Fletcher, "The Allegory of the Pearl, " JEGP, XX (1921), 1-21; and D. W. Robertson, "The 'Heresy' of The Pearl and "The Pearl as Symbol," MLN, LXV (1950), 152-161.
5. Sister Mary Madeleva, "Pearl": A Study in Spiritual Dryness (New York, 1925).
6. Fletcher.
7. Sister Mary Hillman, "Some Debatable Words in Pearl and Its Theme," MLN, LX (1945), 241-248.
8. W. K. Greene, "The Pearl: A New Interpretation," PMLA, XL (1925), 814-827.
9. Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford, 1953), 1. 9. All line references in the text are to this edition.
10. "The Imagery and Diction of The Pearl: Toward an Interpretation," ELH, XX (1953), 169.…
11. Ibid.
12. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1949), pp. 49-59.
13. Ibid, p. 10.
14. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged by D. C. Somervell (Oxford, 1947), p. 217.
15. P. 163 …
16. Pearl, p. xviii.
17. Ibid., p. 72.