[In this excerpt, Everett argues that the so-called alliterative revival was actually part of a continuous tradition and that Pearl can be compared to Milton's Lycidas and Dante's Divine Comedy.]

The Alliterative Morte Arthure and other poems

Nothing that has survived from the early Middle English period prepares us for that later outpouring of alliterative poetry which has conveniently, though probably inaccurately, been termed the 'alliterative revival'. Suddenly (so it appears to us), in the middle of the fourteenth century, a number of poets began to use alliterative verse in the kinds of poetry then most popular—romances, chronicles, political satire, religious and moral allegory—and, continuing throughout this century and the next, they produced, among a good deal that is second-rate or worse, some of the most spirited of Middle English poems, and a few that can stand comparison with good poems of any age. The fact that so much in this poetry is obviously traditional suggests that the suddenness of its beginning must be illusory; for, if it be supposed that the traditional features were the result of a deliberate revival, this demands answers to the questions—what were the models, and, how were they known? LaƷamon's Brut does not provide a satisfactory answer, if only because its uncertain rhythms could not have inspired the far more confident rhythms of the later poems. To answer that other earlier works, now lost, might have been preserved in written or oral form till the second half of the fourteenth century is tantamount to admitting a continuous interest in alliterative verse; and such an interest is at least as likely to have resulted in new compositions as in the constant repetition of old. Moreover, as will appear, the nature of one of the earliest poems of the group seems to indicate that it was not the first of its kind. It is likely then, that alliterative poetry continued to be composed on a considerable scale from generation to generation without a break, and that the features in fourteenth-century verse that appear to be new to the alliterative tradition were adopted gradually, to meet the demands of new subjects and new tastes.

These new features are of various kinds. The traditional vocabulary is often enlarged by a wealth of technical terms, usually French, to do with hunting, architecture, armour, and so forth. The influence of stanzaic verse is seen in the occasional grouping of the alliterative long lines, sometimes in quatrains, sometimes in stanzas using rhyme. Fashionable formal devices such as the dream or the debate are employed, and alliterative poets become as addicted as any others to describing spring mornings, hunting scenes, and elaborate feasts. Yet their poetry remains distinctive in manner and feeling, as well as in metre. Some of the most striking differences between Middle English alliterative poetry and poetry written in other metres are in manner, a liking for specific detail resulting in solid, realistic description; in feeling, a seriousness of outlook which gives unusual strength and purpose, at least to the best of the poems.

There are many and puzzling resemblances in phraseology, style, and theme between the various alliterative poems. Some of these can undoubtedly be explained as the result of deliberate imitation, though ignorance of the exact date of most of the poems often makes it impossible to decide which way the borrowing went. Common authorship has been held to account for some others; but the game of hunting for similar phrases and assigning all works that contain them to a single author was carried much too far by some early critics. It has been shown that many of the poems which were at one time attributed on this evidence to the poet Huchoun, whose name we chance to know from Andrew Wyntoun's Orygynale Cronykil, differ in dialect and in important points of style and metrical technique. Nowadays theories of common authorship are viewed with caution, and scholars prefer to leave the authors of most of the alliterative poems unnamed.

Something is known, however, about where the authors lived. From the remark of Chaucer's Parson:

But trusteth wel, I am a Southern man,
I kan nat geeste 'rum, ram, ruf,' by lettre,
Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre
(Canterbury Tales, 1. 42-44)

we may judge, not, as is often suggested, that Chaucer despised alliterative verse (there are good reasons for not believing this), but that he did not think such verse was composed in his own southern district. The investigations of modern scholars show him, on the whole, to have been right. The original dialects of the alliterative poems, so far as they can be ascertained, have, with very few exceptions, been localized in the western counties from Gloucestershire to Cumberland; the majority of them in the northern half of this district.

If, as we may also infer, Chaucer thought these poems 'provincial', he was right in this too; for most of them came from districts which, as the southerner Trevisa tells us, 'þe kynges of Englelond woneþ fer fram'—districts, that is, far removed from the recognized centres of culture. Yet the odd thing is that some of these poems are not at all what we should expect a provincial poem to be. They have a self-assured air, as if their writers, who were evidently familiar with polite literature, knew what they wanted to achieve and how to set about it. In the no doubt extreme case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there is a knowledge of aristocratic society as complete as in Chaucer's poetry. Such a poem must have been written for a cultured society of some kind, and it is possible that some great families of the west who were in opposition to the king—the Mortimers, Bohuns, and Beauchamps, for instance—may deliberately have fostered verse of native origin as a rival to that poetry, more closely dependent on French, which was written for the court by Chaucer and others. We know that one alliterative poem at least, William of Palerne, was written at the request of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford.

Not all alliterative poetry can have been intended for aristocratic society, however. The greatness of Piers Plowman does not obscure its comparative lack of art, and, however successful modern critics may have been in showing that it is not the shapeless mass that it once seemed to be, it still remains evident that its writer (or writers) felt no compulsion to polish his work. This does not prove that Piers Plowman was written for the common people, though John Ball's letter to the peasants of Essex (1381) shows that they knew of it; but it does suggest that it was intended for a public less literary and less critical than that for which Sir Gawain was written. We must not draw too sharp distinctions between the poems, dividing them into 'aristocratic' and 'popular', for some of the interconnexions that have been mentioned cut across any groupings that might be made. But we may suppose that, in the later fourteenth century, in the districts where it flourished, alliterative poetry was popular in more than one stratum of society. Perhaps there had been, in the preceding period, separate streams of tradition, kept alive in different classes of society, which for some reason or other, and to some extent, intermingled in the fourteenth century.

Pearl

Pearl stands much father apart from other Middle English writings than Sir Gawain. Though its form is influenced by the familiar dream convention, and though it is thoroughly medieval in spirit and work-manship, yet as a whole it is unlike any other Middle English poem. In some respects it is nearer to Lycidas than to anything else in English, for—without prejudice to the controversial question of whether or not Pearl is an elegy—it begins, like Lycidas, by lamenting a loss; from this the poet is led on to consider certain spiritual and moral problems, and he finally reaches understanding and acceptance of God's will. Like Lycidas, Pearl is cast in a conventional literary form, is built with scrupulous artistry and expressed in highly charged language—language, that is, selected and ordered for particular ends. Though the differences between the two poems are, of course, many and important, they are essentially of the same order.

So far as Pearl is concerned, there is much in this statement that needs justification, and it would be well to begin by outlining the poem as impartially as possible. It opens with praise of the pearl which the poet has lost in an 'erbere' ['herb garden'] and he tells how, on going back to the spot, he finds it covered with so many sweet flowering plants that he is over-powered by their fragrance and falls asleep. He passes in spirit into a marvellous country and, on the other side of a river, he perceives a maiden clad in gleaming white garments set with pearls. He recognizes her: 'I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere',¹ 'Ho watƷ me nerre þen aunte or nece';² and he begins to question her: 'What fate has carried away my jewel and plunged me in such grief?' (249-50). The maiden rebukes him, saying that he has no cause for grief, for, though she was but young when she departed, her Lord the Lamb took her in marriage and crowned her queen.

The dreamer cannot believe this, for surely Mary is the Queen of Heaven. But the maiden explains that in heaven no one dispossesses any other, and all are kings and queens; and then, as he protests that she is too young to be a queen, she relates the parable of the workers in the vineyard to show that the first shall be last, and the last first. The dreamer still protests, for this means that he who works less receives more. The maiden replies that there is no question of more or less in God's kingdom; His grace is enough for all. The sinner who repents finds grace, why not the innocent who never sinned? 'When such knock there upon the dwelling, quickly shall the gate be unlatched for them' (727-8). In the kingdom of heaven is endless bliss, the pearl of great price, which the merchant sold all that he had to purchase. In answer to the dreamer's further questions, he is permitted to see the New Jerusalem and, in the streets of it, a procession headed by the Lamb. In the throng that follows Him he sees his 'lyttel quene'.

Longing to be with her, he is about to start into the stream, but he suddenly awakes, to find himself back in the 'erbere'. Though full of grief at his banishment from the fair country of his vision, he cries:

If hit be ueray and soth sermoun,
Þat þou so strykeƷ in garlande gay,
So wel is me in þys doel-doungoun,
Þat þou art to þat PrynseƷ paye.³

He reflects that, had he been more submissive to God's will, he might have come to know more of His mysteries, and he ends by offering up his vision to God, praying that God may 'grant us to be the servants of His household and precious pearls for His pleasure'.

This summary is perhaps sufficient to suggest the nature of the appeal made by Pearl, but it cannot convey the qualities which make it an outstanding example of poetic art.

In this poem, as in all great poems, form and content are not separable; and both are evident alike in the smallest detail and in the conception and shaping of the whole.

As in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the matter of Pearl is ordered so as to form a pattern. Naturally the means by which this is done here differ from those employed in the narrative poem, and the pattern is all-embracing, as it is not in Sir Gawain. Of the twenty equal sections of the poem⁴ the first four are mainly devoted to presenting the dreamer's state of mind and to description of the dream-country and of Pearl herself; argument and exposition occupy the central twelve sections, and the last four again contain description, this time of the New Jerusalem, and end with the poet's reflections. This pattern is emphasized by the echoing of the first line of the poem, 'Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye',⁵ in the last, 'Ande precious perleƷ vnto his pay'.The metrical scheme, which subdivides the poem into smaller sections and at the same time links all its parts into a continuous sequences, forms a second pattern, subsidiary to the main one but concurrent with it. There are 101 stanzas of twelve four-stressed lines, rhyming a b a b a b a b b c b c . Two or more of the stresses are usually marked by alliteration. The stanzas fall into groups of five, the same refrain being used in the last line of each of the five, and it is thus that the poem is divided into the twenty equal sections, though section XV, exceptionally, contains six stanzas. A keyword or phrase in the refrain is always echoed in the first line of the following stanza; this means that the sections are linked to one another, since a significant word is repeated, in the first line of each new section, from the refrain of the preceding one. The echo between the first and last lines of the poem gives the effect of a completed circle, intended perhaps to suggest the idea of the pearl, which in 1.738 is called 'endeleƷ rounde'.⁶

The same stanza form, and the linking, are found elsewhere in Middle English, in some lyrics in the Vernon MS. for instance; but nowhere else is there anything like this complex scheme, nor is the stanza handled with such mastery. This poet makes good use of the natural break after the eighth line, and, within the line, he allows himself freedom in the use of alliteration and varies the rhythm and the number of syllables. Thus, within the rigid metrical scheme of the whole, the line, its smallest unit, is flexible. The following stanzas, one descriptive, one argumentative, illustrate some of these characteristics. They also illustrate what appears to be a general practice, the greater use of alliteration in description:

The dubbemente of þo derworth depe
Wern bonkeƷ bene of beryl bryƷt;
Swangeande swete þe water con swepe,
Wyth a rownande rourde raykande aryƷt;
In þe founce þer stonden stoneƷ stepe,
As glente þurƷ glas þat glowed and glyƷt;
As stremande sterneƷ, quen stroþe men slepe,
Staren in welkyn in wynter nyƷt;
For vche a pobbel in pole þer pyƷt
Watz emerad, saffer, oþer gemme gente,
Þat alle þe loƷe lemed of lyƷt,
So dere watƷ hit adubbement.⁷

Grace innogh þe mon may haue
þat synneƷ þenne new, Ʒif him repente,
Bot wyth sorƷ and syt he mot hit craue,
And byde þe payne þerto is bent.
Bot resoun of ryƷt þat con not raue
SaueƷ euermore þe innossent;
Hit is a dom þat neuer God gaue,
Þat euer þe gyltleƷ schulde be schente.
Þe gyltyf may contryssyoun hente,
And be þurƷ mercy to grace þryƷt;
Bot he to gyle þat neuer glente,
As innoscente is saf by ryƷte.⁸

The refrains are the most difficult part of this scheme to manage, but on the whole the poet is amazingly successful with them. Often they appear to fit naturally into his train of thought, but when necessary he will vary them slightly. The emphasis which certain words receive from so much repetition is rarely misplaced; indeed, most of the reiterated words and pharses are so essential to the poem as a whole that, taken in order, they almost form a key to its contents. There are some sections, certainly, in which the repetition seems mechanical, and others in which the meaning of the repeated word or phrase has to be ingeniously stretched to fit every context in which it is used. Yet the poet can make a poetic virtue even of this kind of ingenuity, or of something very closely akin to it. In Section VIII the refrain word 'cortasye', is used to mean, not only 'courtesy', 'courtliness', but 'generosity', 'benevolence', and, as critics have pointed out, it is sometimes almost a synonym for 'grace' (divine favour or condescension). No one of these meanings fits every context in this section, but the poet uses now one, now another, while keeping all the time some reflection of the basic meanings 'courtliness', 'courtesy', and its implications. This is achieved by the use of many words such as 'queen', 'king', 'emperor', 'empress', 'court' which are naturally associated with 'courtliness' and 'courtesy'. So the lesson of Section VII—that though Mary is Queen of Heaven, she is also Queen of Courtesy, and none who comes there is, or feels himself to be, dispossessed, but each is 'king and queen by courtesy'—is doubly conveyed by clear statement which can be intellectually apprehended and by all the associations of the word 'courtesy'.

Such exploitation of the association of words is a marked feature of the whole poem and takes many forms, from mere word-play, dependent on similarity of sound, as in the line 'So is hys mote wythouten moote',⁹ to the vividly metaphorical language of the following lines:

I loked among his meyny schene
How þay wyth lyf wern laste and lade¹⁰

or of these:

For þoƷ þou daunce as any do,
Braundysch and bray þy braþe breme,
When þou no fyrre may, to ne fro,
Þou moste abyde þat he schal deme.¹¹

Some words already have poetic or literary associations which are of value to the context in which they are used. So, 'douth', having dignified associations from its use in old heroic poetry, but having lost the precise significance of the Old English 'dugup',¹² is at once impressive and mysterious enough to be used of the hosts of hell, earth, and heaven that gaze upon the Lamb (839-10). In writing of his longing for the Pearl the poet evokes, by the word 'luf-daungere',¹³ memories of the separation of lovers, and of the love-longing so often described by poets of the Roman de la Rose tradition. Especially in descriptive passages, his phrasing is full of echoes; and it is here that they have most value, for in all his descriptions the poet is attempting to present something transcending ordinary human experience. In the description of the maiden, he calls to his aid conceptions of feminine beauty by using terms from the romances, and throughout the opening descriptions there are reminiscences, verbal and otherwise, of the Garden of Love in the Roman de la Rose. The flowers on the spot where Pearl was lost are, like those in the Garden of Love, fragrant spices known for their healing properties; and the trees, the birds, the river of the country of the poet's vision could not fail to remind his readers of that beautiful garden. Yet the details—the 'flaumbande hweƷ'¹⁴ of the birds, the tree-trunks 'blwe as ble of ynde',¹⁵ the emeralds, sapphires, and other gems that lie at the bottom of the stream—are peculiar to this description and less realistic than those in the Roman; for this land is more remote from normal experience than the Garden of Love and surpasses it in beauty. At one point the poet compares the banks of the river to 'fyldor fyn',¹⁶ normally associated with jewellery or, in simile, with golden hair, and the effect of this fantastic comparison is to convey the splendour of the banks and at the same time their unreality. To the modern mind, however, the associations with nature evoked by some of the poet's similes are probably more effective—the comparison, for instance, of the precious stones glinting through the water to stars that shine on a winter night,¹⁷ or of the sudden appearance of the procession of Virgins to the rising of the moon:

RyƷt as þe maynful mone con rys
Er þenne þe day-glem dryue al doun,
So sodanly on a wonder wyse
I watƷ war of a prosessyoun.¹⁸

More than any secular book it is the Bible that fills the poet's mind and imagination. When he describes his distress, 'My herte watƷ al wyth mysse remorde, As wallande water gotƷ out of welle',¹⁹ he is recalling the Psalmist's 'Sicut aqua effusus sum'; at the words of the Lamb, 'Cum hyder to me, my lemman swete, For mote ne spot is non in þe' (763-4), the maiden is invested with the associations of the Song of Songs ('et macula non est in te. Veni de Libano sponsa mea … '). In the central portion of the poem the poet makes constant appeal to the authority of the Bible, buttressing his argument by passages drawn from it. The ease with which he passes from one part of it to another is an indication both of his familiarity with it and of the alert independence of his mind. In Section XIV and the beginning of XV, where the maiden is replying to the dreamer's question 'Quat kyn þyng may be þat Lambe?',²⁰ her answer is a tissue of reminiscences of Isaiah liii, of the Gospels, of the Book of Revelation and of other passages, all co-ordinated into a coherent and moving statement.

However closely dependent on the Bible the poet may be, he always follows his own line of thought. The parable of the workers in the vineyard, which is a close paraphrase of Matthew xx. 1-16, is interpreted in a way that is relevant to the argument and, so far as is known, unique; and, in the description of the New Jerusalem, the poet makes his own choice of details from the Book of Revelation and presents them in his own order.

With the parable of the pearl of great price (Matthew xiii. 45-46), from which the symbolism of the poem largely derives, it is not the Bible alone that the poet has in mind, but, in addition, various interpretations of it. The parable is alluded to and partly paraphrased in 11. 729-32, just after the reference to Jesus calling the little children to Him, and the implication would seem to be that the precious pearl (the 'spotless pearl' in the words of the poem) means innocence. But at the same time it means the kingdom of heaven, the reward of innocence, for 11. 729 ff. state explicitly that the pearl which the merchant sought is 'the joy that cannot cease' which is found in the kingdom of heaven, and in the next stanza (lxii) the maiden shows in what respects the pearl resembles that kingdom. She finally identifies it with the pearl she wears upon her breast which, she says, her Lord the Lamb placed there in token of peace. Of the many interpretations of the pearl of great price which might have been familiar to the poet, Gregory's statement that 'margarita vero mystic significat … dulcitudinem coelestis vitae', or that of Petrus Chrysologus that the pearl is 'vita aeterna', may lie behind his thought here; and there may even be a hint at the interpretation, used in Usk's Testament of Love, that the pearl of great price means grace. The poet shifts to yet another interpretation in the first line of stanza lxiii, when the maiden herself is addressed as the 'spotless pearl'. Here he is probably thinking of St. Bonaventura's 'Bonae margaritae sunt omnes sancti'. It is evident that in this passage the poet is playing upon various ideas connected with the pearl of great price in much the same way as he plays upon the meanings of the word 'cortasye', and he sums up the complex symbolism of the passage in the lines which the dreamer addresses to the maiden:

'O maskeleƷ Perle in perleƷ pure,
Þat bereƷ', quod I, 'þe perle of prys … '²¹

It is likely that, to a medieval lover of poetry, many of the passages that have been quoted in the preceding pages would have conveyed a rather different impression from that which they make on a modern critic. While not less alive to their effects, he would at the same time have recognized them as examples of the rhetorical 'figures' and colours which Chaucer's Host begs the Clerk to keep till he composes in the 'high style'; and he would have noticed many others, for rhetorical devices of all kinds abound in the poem. In Pearl, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the whole method of composition, including the planning of the poem, is determined by the precepts of the rhetoricians. But, again as in Sir Gawain, it is not rhetorical doctrine but the poet's artistic sense that is the ultimate court of appeal. In some of his descriptive passages, where he needs to create an impression of gorgeous beauty, he writes in the 'high style' enriching his expression by every means he knows; but when he wishes, he can write simply, with few devices, comparatively little alliteration, and few words that were not in common use. The paraphrase of the parable of the workers in the vineyard is for the most part in this simple style, and a comparison of this passage with the description of the dream-country makes it possible to answer the criticism that the poet's vocabulary is 'faulty in too great copiousness'. It is obvious that there is 'copiousness' where it is in place, but not everywhere.

Another objection might perhaps more legitimately be brought against Pearl. It might be argued that a work so meticulously wrought must be lacking in vital force, that such close attention to form and expression cannot be compatible with the creation of poetry that is 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge'. To this the only answer is a personal one. To many readers, the present writer among them, the human emotion manifested in the poem appears to be its driving force and its motive. Whether the poet is describing his grief, or wrestling in argument, or realizing the joy of those who follow the Lamb, there is an urgency and a passionate sincerity in his writing which forbids one to regard it as a mere exercise in the poetic art. This has been widely felt, even though there has been no general agreement about the nature of the poet's loss or the meaning of his poem.

These are problems still in dispute, and possibly incapable of final solution, since it will not do to argue that, because the poet makes us feel a sense of loss, Pearl must represent a real child and cannot be the allegorical representation of some virtue or, as has even been suggested, of the poet's own soul in a state of perfection. For men have grieved for such losses as much as for the loss of a child. Yet, on the whole, it seems most satisfactory to assume that the poem was inspired by the death of a loved child, not necessarily a daughter or a sister, for the line 'Ho²² watƷ me nerre²³ þen aunte or nece' need not imply blood-relationship.The poet's grief is intensified by his uncertainty about her fate, for she died too young to please God by works or even to pray (484). In the vision that is granted him, he is convinced, both by argument and by the sight of his 'lyttel quene' in the New Jerusalem, that she is saved and that she is among those who follow the Lamb; and with this reassurance he is able to resign himself to God's will.

R. Wellek has shown that the child's fate could have presented a real problem at the time when Pearl was written.²⁴ Though belief in the salvation of the baptized child through free grace was widely held from the time of Augustine, yet the matter was still under discussion in the fourteenth century. The reaffirmation by Thomas Bradwardine (d. 1340), in De Causa Dei contra Pelagium, of the doctrine of salvation by grace, against those who held the Pelagian heresy of salvation by merit, points to an interest in fourteenth-century England in matters fundamentally connected with this. Hence the poet's anxiety to know what had happened to the child, and his concern with the nature of grace, are understandable. Clearly the maiden's answer, that the innocent who have been baptized (626-7) are saved, 'For þe grace of God is gret innoghe',²⁵ is not, as one critic has suggested, unorthodox; and it would appear that R. Wellek was right in maintaining that there is nothing unorthodox, either, in the high position in heaven which is assigned to the child. The intellectual and spiritual struggle presented in the poem is not waged against orthodox beliefs; rather, it is a struggle to accept the teaching of the Church by one who wishes to do so, but is beset by doubts.

The battle must, of course, have been won before the poem was written, since it is the poet who, in the person of Pearl, provides the answers to his own difficulties. But it is not the least of his powers as a poet that he conveys the agony of the struggle as if it were still to win. There is a close parallel to the Divina Commedia here. Small as the scale of Pearl is compared with Dante's poem, the method is essentially the same. In both, the process of enlightenment is presented by means of a dialogue between a mortal seeking it and a celestial being, once a loved mortal, who now possesses knowledge, by virtue of her position in heaven. In both, the poet has, as it were, split himself into two, so that he can present at once his ignorance and uncertainty and his knowledge and confidence; and, since his serene confidence, and even his power to understand, was not achieved unaided, but was the result of divine revelation both direct and through the teaching of the Church, the person of the instructor is rightly represented as insusceptible of human emotion, remote and incomprehensible, while the person of the instructed remains human and prone to emotion, and for that reason able to arouse emotion. Though the dialogue form is often used in medieval literature to convey instruction, the similarity here is unusually close; and it is between something so fundamental to each poem that it affords far better grounds for thinking that the poet of Pearl knew the Divina Commedia than some of the lesser parallels that have been cited.

If this be the right way of looking at the poem, there is little point in the old argument as to whether Pearl is an elegy or an allegory. Though it has, of course, elegiac and allegorical elements in it, it is not to be comprehended by either term, and it could with as much justice be called a homily, a debate (disputatio), or a vision of the other world. None of these labels, by itself, is any more illuminating than the bare terms 'elegy' or 'pastoral' would be, if applied to Lycidas.

This brings us back to the starting-point and by now it should have become clearer in what respects Lycidas and Pearl are alike and in what they differ. Perhaps the most surprising thing is the marked similarity of their conclusions. The vision of the Catholic poet of Pearl ends where the Protestant Milton's does:

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
… but mounted high
Through the dear might of him that walked
  the waves.…
And hears the unexpressive nuptial Song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love,
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops and sweet Societies.

Notes

1. 'I knew her well, I had seen her before' (164).
2. 'She was nearer to me than aunt or niece' (233).
3. 'If it is indeed sober truth that thou movest thus in a gay garland, then I am content, in this prison of grief, that thou art to the Prince's pleasure' (1158-8).
4. Indicated by initial capitals in the manuscript.
5. 'Pearl, a precious thing for the Prince's pleasure'.
6. 'endlessly round'.
7. 'The beauties of those precious deeps [i.e. deep waters] were pleasant banks of bright beryl; swinging softly, the water swept with a whispering voice, flowing straight on. In the depth there lay bright stones that glowed and glittered like lights through glass; shimmering like stars, which, while men on earth are sleeping, gleam in the heavens on a winter night. For every pebble set there in the pool was an emerald, sapphire or precious gem, so that all the water shimmered with light, so splendid was its adornment' (109-20).
8. 'Grace enough may that man have who sins afresh, if he will repent; but with sorrow and lamentation he must crave it and endure the pain that is bound with it. But Reason, Who cannot swerve from justice, evermore saves the innocent. It is a judgment that God never gave that ever the innocent should be discomfited. The guilty man may cling to contrition and by mercy be drawn back to grace—but he who never turned aside to sin, being innocent is saved by right' (661-72, emending MS. at to as, and MS. & to by in the last line.)
9. 'So is His dwelling without spot' (948).
10. 'I gazed among His radiant following [and saw] how they were loaded and weighed down with life' (1145-6).
11. 'For, though you skip about like any doe, rush to and fro, and bray out your fierce wrath, when you can go no further, forwards or backwards, you must put up with what He decrees' (345-8).
12. 'a band of noble retainers'.
13. 'separation in love' (11). 'Danger', in the Roman de la Rose, comes between the lover and the beloved.
14. 'flaming colours'.
15. 'blue as indigo'.
16. 'fine gold thread'.
17. See p. 88.
18. 'Even as the mighty moon rises before the gleam of day has quite descended thence, so suddenly, in a miraculous way, I was aware of a procession' (1093-6).
19. 'My heart was all stricken with grief [so that I was] like rushing water pouring from a stream' (364-5).
20. 'What kind of thing may that Lamb be?
21. ' "Oh spotless Pearl, in pure pearls, that wears", said I, "the pearl of price" ' (745-6).
22. 'She'.
23. 'nearer'.
24. 'The Pearl: an interpretation of the Middle English Poem', Studies in English by Members of the English Seminar at the Charles University, iv (Prague, 1933).
25. ' enough'.