[In the following essay, Gardner places Pearl in the tradition of alliterative courtly verse and comments on the poet's skillful use of the elaborate ornamentation created with patterns of rhyme, alliteration, numeric symbolism, and the important symbolism emanating from the four-level system of biblical exegesis.]

In their selection of poetic forms, Chaucer and the Gawain-poet differ. Chaucer's parson disparages the ancient English "rum, ram, ruf" school of poetry, and whether or not Chaucer agrees with his parson, his poems are not alliterative. The Gawain-poet, on the other hand, announces at once in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that he intends to tell his story

Rightly, as it is written,
A story swift and strong
With letters locked and linking,
As scōps have always sung.
[part 1, st. 2, 11. 33-36]

And whereas Chaucer explores numerous poetic genres and more often than not completely transforms them, the Gawain-poet for the most part holds to the old conventions, within them writing homilies, a courtly dream-vision, a saint's legend, and, surprisingly, a most unconventional Arthurian romance. In both his choice of form and his choice of subject, the Gawain-poet is mainly, though not entirely, a conscious traditionalist.

To call a poet a traditionalist is not to call him unoriginal. The questions to be asked concerning such a poet are: Where was the tradition when he found it? How did he reinterpret or extend the tradition? For the most part we can only speculate, drawing inferences from the poems and from the practice of other poets of the day. The chief hindrance is our lack of information concerning the courts where the provincial poets wrote. It must be understood that, generally speaking, a poet of the fourteenth century wrote for an audience, not primarily for himself or posterity. To allude to books or build symbols from philosophical systems his immediate audience could not possibly know might suggest overweening pride. In practice poets frequently put together extremely familiar materials in new ways to achieve new effects, at best a new vision of reality. Thus in the Troilus, for instance, Chaucer combines Dante, Boethius, a story from Boccaccio, and possibly the story of the Fall of Man, among other things, to create something strikingly new.

All the surviving west and northwest Midlands alliterative poetry shows a similar manipulation of conventional materials. A stock May morning passage—shining leaves, birds singing like angels, fields full of flowers—enters the Morte Arthure as an ironic contrast to Arthur's warlike deeds; in The Parliament of the Three Ages the same materials comment on the narrator's poaching of a deer; in Winner and Waster the stock passage, slightly modified, establishes the parallel between winning and wasting in Nature, on one hand, and winning and wasting in human society, on the other; in Piers Plowman the same convention, treated more realistically and localized at Malvern Hills, becomes the foundation for a series of allegorical dreams. Many of these alliterative poems present arming scenes like those in Sir Gawain, and The Parliament of the Three Ages presents a hunt which seems designed to contrast with legal and noble hunts like those in Sir Gawain. The description of Youth in the Parliament may or may not be conventional but certainly calls to mind the Gawain-poet's description of the Green Knight. The Parliament-poet says of Youth (ll. 109-23):

The first was a fierce man, fairer than the
 others,
A bold knight on a steed and dressed to ride,
A knight on a noble horse, a hawk on his
 wrist.
He was big in the chest and broad in the
 shoulders,
And his arms, likewise, were large and long,
And his waist was handsomely shaped as a
 maiden's;
His legs were long and sturdy, handsome to
 see.
He straightened up in his stirrups and stood
 aloft,
And he had neither hood nor hat to hide his
 hair,
But a garland on his head, a glorious one
Arrayed with bright red roses, richest of
 flowers,
With trefoils and true-love knots and delicate
 pearls,
And there in the center a splendid carbuncle.
He was outfitted in green interwoven with
 gold,
Adorned with golden coins and beautiful
 beryl.…

Other parts of the description of Youth recall the Pearl. Like the child in the Pearl, Youth's garments are sewn all around with gems, but the gems are, instead of pearls, the chalcedonies, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts, and so forth which are associated in the Pearl with the New Jerusalem. Two of the alliterative poems, Morte Arthure and "Summer Sunday," present elaborate descriptions of Lady Fortune spinning her wheel. And a host of poems in Middle English, from The Owl and the Nightingale to Winner and Waster, make use of the formal debate. In short, the new use of old materials is a central feature of the medieval poet's practice.

But though some literary sources of the provincial poetry have been identified, we still know relatively little about what books poets had at hand in the provincial centers or what the audiences there were like. This much is certain: the works which emanated from them demonstrate a high culture. All of the great poems from the provincial centers reveal a common interest in the gentleman's pursuits—hunting, hawking, music, chess, law, the old code of chivalry, theoretical discussion of heaven and earth. It is now generally agreed that the poems also reveal something more: the technical mastery of Old English meter in the many alliterative poems from the various sections of rural England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries argues not so much an "alliterative revival" as a fourteenth-century renaissance within a continuous poetic tradition from Anglo-Saxon to late medieval times.

Continuous or not, it is clear that the tradition did not come down to the Gawain-poet in its tenth-century form. Between the Anglo-Saxon era of "wide gabled halls" and the High Middle Ages with its "chalk-white chimneys," life in England changed drastically. Simple adornment of jewels and gold plate evolved to splendid ornamental shields, carved fretwork, gold-trammeled tapestry work from Toulouse and Tars; the plated boar's head helmet gave way to riveted steel and the Near Eastern helmet cover intricately wrought of crochet work, rubies, diamonds, and plumes; the simple scheme of protector and retainers became the elaborate feudal system emanating from God. Poetic theory reflected this efoliation. (One can see the change coming, perhaps, in the Old English poetry of Cynewulf, when he fashions a picture of the cross in the scheme of human relationships in Elene, when he weaves a runic signature into his verse, or when he shifts, in his comments on art, into rhyme.) By the late fourteenth century, especially in the northwest and in Scotland, elaborate prosodic devices are the fashion. Gawain is only one of many poems which play classic Old English alliterative long lines against French rhyme in a bob and wheel. The Pearl is only one of many poems in which stanzas are interlinked by verbal repetition. Consider the extreme ingenuity of "Summer Sunday," a poem the Gawain-poet may have known:

SUMMER SUNDAY

[? A Lament for Edward II, 1327]
—Anonymous

On a summer Sunday I saw the sun
 Rising up early on the rim of the east:
Day dawned on the dunes, dark lay the town;
 I caught up my clothes, I would go to the
 groves in haste;
With the keenest of kennel-dogs, crafty and
 quick to sing,
 And with huntsmen, worthies, I went at
 once to the woods.
So rife on the ridge the deer and dogs would
 run
 That I liked to loll under limbs in the cool
 glades
    And lie down.
  The kennel-dogs quested the kill
  With barking bright as a bell;
  Disheartened the deer in the dell
   And made the ridge resound.

Ridge and rill resounded with the rush of the
  roes in terror
  And the boisterous barking the brilliant
  bugle bade.

I stood, stretched up, saw dogs and deer
  together
  Where they slipped under shrubs or scattered
  away in the shade.
There lords and ladies with lead-leashes
 loitered
 With fleet-footed greyhounds that frolicked
 about and played.
And I came to the ground where grooms
 began to cry orders,
 And walked by wild water and saw on the
 other side
    Deep grass.
  I sauntered by the stream, on the strand,
  And there by the flood found
  A boat lying on the land;
   And so I left the place.

So I left the place, more pleased with my own
 way,
 And wandered away in the woods to find
 who I'd find.
I lounged a long while and listened—on a
  slope I lay—
  Where I heard not a hound or a hunter or
  hart or hind.
So far I'd walked I'd grown weary of the
  way;
  Then I left my little game and leaned on a
  limb
And standing there I saw then, clear as day,
 A woman with a wonderful wheel wound by
 the wind.
    I waited then.
   Around that wheel were gathered
   Merry men and maids together;
   Most willingly I went there
    To try my fortune.

Fortune, friend and foe, fairest of the dear,
 Was fearful, false, and little of faith, I found.
She spins the wheel to weal and from weal to
 woe
 In the running ring like a roebuck running
 round.
At a look from that lovely lady there,
 I gladly got into the game, cast my goods to
 the ground.
Ah, could I recount, count up, cunning and clear,
 The virtues of that beauty who in bitterness
 bound
    Me tight!
  Still, some little I'll stay
  To tell before turning away—
  All my reasons in array
   I'll readily write.

Readily I'll write dark runes to read:
 No lady alive is more lovely in all this land;

I'd go anywhere with that woman and think
  myself glad,
  So strangely fair her face; at her waist, I
  found,
The gold of her kirtle like embers gleamed
  and glowed.
  But in bitter despair that gentle beauty soon
  bound
Me close, when her laughing heart I had given
 heed.
 Wildly that wonderful wheel that woman
 wound
   With a will.
  A woman of so much might,
  So wicked a wheel-wright,
  Had never struck my sight,
   Truth to tell.
Truth to tell, sitting on the turf I saw then
 A gentleman looking on, in a gaming mood,
 gay,
Bright as the blossoms, his brows bent
 To the wheel the woman whirred on its way.
It was clear that with him all was well as the
  wheel went,
  For the laughed, leaned back, and seemed at
  ease as he lay.
A friendly look toward me that lord sent,
 And I could imagine no man more merry
 than he
    In his mind.
  I gave the knight greeting.
  He said, "You see, my sweeting,
  The crown of that handsome king?
   I claim it as mine!

"As mine to me it will come:
As King I claim the kingdom,
The kingdom is mine.
To me the wheel will wind.
Wind well, worthy dame;
Come fortune, friendly game;
Be game now, and set
Myself on that selfsame seat!"

I saw him seated then at splendid height,
  Right over against the rim of the running
  ring;
He cast knee over knee as a great king might,
 Handsomely clothed in a cloak and crowned
 as a king.
Then high of heart he grew in his gambling
  heat;
  Laid one leg on the other leg and sat
  lounging;
Unlikely it looked that his lordship would fall
  in the bet;
  All the world, it seemed, was at his
  wielding
     By right.

   On my knees I kissed that king.
   He said, "You see, my sweeting,
   How I reign by the ring,
    Most high in might?

   "Most high in might, queen and knight
   Come at my call.
   Foremost in might,
   Fair lords at my foot fall.
   Lordly the life I lead,
   No lord my like is living,
   No duke living need I dread,
   For I reign by right as King."
Of kings it seems most sad to speak and set
  down
 How they sit on that seemly seat awhile,
 then in wastes are in sorrow
   sought.
I beheld a man with hair like the leaves of the
  horehound,
  All black were his veins, his brow to
  bitterness brought;
His diadem with diamonds dripped down
 But his robes hung wild, though beautifully
 wrought;
Torn away was his treasure—tent, tower,
  town—
  Needful and needing, naked; and nought
     His name.
   Kindly I kissed that prince.
   He spoke words, wept tears;
   Now he, pulled down from his place,
    A captive had become.

   "Become a captive outcast,
   Once mighty kings would call
   Me king. From friends I fall,
   Long time from all love, now little, lo! at
 the last.
   Fickle is fortune, now far from me;
   Now weal, now woe,
   Now knight, now king, now captive."
A captive he had become, his life a care;
 Many joys he had lost and all his mastery.
Then I saw him sorrier still and hurt still
 more:
 A bare body in a bed, on a bier they bore
 him past me,
A duke driven down into death, hidden in the
 dark.

The ornamental devices in "Summer Sunday" are unusually intricate. Lines both alliterate and rhyme, and in certain sections the last word of a line is the same as the first word of the next line in the same stanza; stanzas are linked by verbal repetition; separate episodes are linked by the image of the circle; and the shape of the stanzas in the poem comes to be reversed, reflecting the thematic reversal of Fortune. But though this poem is, like the work of the Gawain-poet, intricate, many of the same devices are to be found, in isolation or together, in even the most slipshod popular poetry of the day. And since they appear frequently, rhyme linking, combined alliteration and rhyme, and other entirely ornamental devices can doubtless be considered conventional. Thus, to the extent that it is merely ornamental, we probably ought to consider conventional even the Gawain-poet's "signature," his characteristic use of a particular phrase or stylistic device at the beginning and end of each of his poems. (The same device appears in some Scottish poetry.)

The real significance of the Gawain-poet's devices is not simply that he uses them, but rather that his use of them is meticulous—his alliterative rules are unusually rigorous—and that his devices normally embody a direct fusion of form and content. Take, for example, the Pearl. Gollancz pointed out that the twelve-line stanzas of the Pearl are perhaps best viewed as primitive sonnets. (His view has for some reason not been widely accepted, but he is right that sonnets of roughly the same type appear in Italy before Dante.) If we accept Gollancz' suggestion, or at any rate if we are able to see each stanza as, at least much of the time, more or less a unit in itself, developing a single dramatic tension, image, or philosophical idea, then the linked ring of one hundred (or, surely by accident, one hundred and one)¹ stanzas in the Pearl has symbolic relationship to the transmutation within the poem of flower imagery into jewel imagery (Nature into Art), reflecting the contrast between mortal life and eternal life. Thus the circular poem becomes the artistic reflection of the "garland" of the blessed (a circle of artificial flowers) about the throne of God.²

If we believe that the poet had some reason for linking stanzas and organizing other material as he did, we are, I think, forced to conclude that number symbolism of an ingenious sort is also used in the poem. Three is the mystical number of the Trinity, complement of the tripartite soul in man, and it may also suggest unity and completion, the Pythagorean "beginning, middle, and end." This Pythagorean (and Christian) use of three appears as an element in the five-part structure of the poem. The first and last five-stanza sections frame a dream that comes in three parts which, as we shall see later, may be interpreted as presenting together the whole of Christian illumination. Five, the number of linked stanzas in each section, has various associations as we learn in the Gawain, but most commonly suggests the five joys of Mary and the five wounds of Christ, both of which associations are appropriate in the Pearl, where the Virgin is both emblem and road of man's salvation and where the blood of Christ functions throughout as a controlling symbol. In the first of the three sections of the dream the central image is a stream, a detail borrowed from courtly French and Italian poetry but explicitly identified here as the river in Paradise, which for the patristic exegetes is a "sign" or foreshadowing of the "well-spring," Christ (cf. John 7:38). The second section of the dream focuses first on the parable of the vineyard, hence, symbolically—and this too is made explicit in the poem—the "wine" or blood by which man is redeemed, and then (starting at stanza 51) on grace, which comes to be identified with "Water and blood of the wide wound." The third section of the dream identifies blood, grace, light, and music. Ten is in a different way a number of completion. (Ten times ten is the number of stanzas probably intended.) St. Augustine writes:

Again, the number ten signifies a knowledge of the Creator and the creature; for the trinity is the Creator and the septenary indicates the creature by reason of his life and body. For with reference to life there are three, whence we should love God with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds; and with reference to the body there are very obviously four elements of which it is made.³

Four, or the square, is traditionally associated with world-wide extension (four winds, four evangelists), and for Augustine it is also emblematic of time (four seasons, four parts of the day). Thus at the end of time, on the day of the Last Judgment, Christ reads from a book with square pages. (This image is not found in the Apocalypse but is introduced by the poet.) Twelve—a number repeatedly mentioned in the final section of the Pearl—is the number of the Mystical Body, the Church Universal, and is thus also the number of salvation. In addition to the relevance of specific symbolic numbers to the theme of the Pearl, number symbolism has a general relevance in that mathematical relationships, unlike human beings or roses, are immutable. Boethius writes that mathematics deals with the intelligible and finds that

it itself includes the first or intellectible part in virtue of its own thought and understanding, directed as these are to the celestial works of supernal divinity and to whatever sublunary beings enjoy more blessed mind and purer substance, and, finally, to human souls. All of these things, though they once consisted of that primary intellectible substance, have since, by contact with bodies, degenerated from the level of intellectibles to that of intelligibles; as a result, they are less objects of understanding than active agents of it, and they find greater happiness by the purity of their understanding whenever they apply themselves to the study of things intellectible.⁴

And Hugh of St. Victor, commenting on this passage, writes:

For the nature of spirits and souls, because it is incorporeal and simple, participates in intellectible substance; but because through the sense organs spirit or soul descends in different ways to the apprehension of physical objects and draws into itself a likeness of them through its imagination, it deserts its simplicity somehow by admitting a type of composition.⁵

Thus by the use of mystical numbers the poet reinforces the central contrast in the poem between the soul in Nature and the soul liberated from Nature.

The "signature" in the Pearl is equally functional. The contrast between the first and last lines of the poem focuses the conflict between unselfishness and selfishness, or in exegetical language, between a proper and reasonable view of earthly treasure, on one hand, and on the other, "concupiscence" in the theological sense, an undue regard for the things of this world.

Ornamental devices are less conspicuous in the Gawain, mainly because the symbolic extension of the surface action is more deeply embedded in the poem. The alliterative long lines are appropriate, though only in the most general way, reflecting the ancient English poetic mode in a poem purporting to deal with ancient native tradition. (The Gawain-stanza, sometimes modified in one way or another, is common in courtly provincial verse and may itself have been regarded as traditional.) The bob and wheel device found in this poem is sometimes merely decorative, but it does often have an important thematic or dramatic function. For instance, in the opening lines the poet writes:

    Felix Brutus
On the slopes of many broad hills established
 Britain
  with joy,
   Where war and wrack and wonder
   Have sometimes since held sway,
   And now bliss, now blunder,
   Turned like dark and day.
[Part I, st. I, 11. 13-19]

Here all that follows the pivotal phrase "with joy" (the "bob") contrasts with the force of that phrase, setting up an irony which extends to the whole of the poem. (The four lines which follow the "bob" comprise the "wheel.") The "signature" in the Gawain, the opening and closing concern with the fall of Troy, is relevant to the central conflict in the poem between the vulnerability of mortal kingdoms and the permanence of the Kingdom of God.

In some respects the most interesting of the Gawain poet's signature—if we may rightly call it a full-blown signature—is that in St. Erkenwald. The signature here involves not verbal repetition but the repetition of a stylistic device. The poem opens:

At London in England no long while since—
Since when Christ suffered on the cross and
  Christendom was built—
There was a bishop …

The last two stanzas of the poem read:

For as soon as that soul was established in
 bliss,
That other creation that covered the bones
 corrupted;
For the everlasting life, the life without end,
Voids all that vanity that avails man nothing.

Then was there praising of the Lord and the
 lifting of hymns:
Mourning and joy in that moment came
 together.
They passed forth in procession, and all the
 people followed,
And all the bells of the city sang out at once.

The poet's repetition is stylistic: "since, since" in the opening lines has its echo in "all the people … all the bells" which appears in the closing lines. The echo calls attention to the relationship between the two passages. Both contrast London (a particular point in space) and the spatial concept of universal Christendom, earth and heaven; and both passages also contrast historical time and time as it exists in the mind of God. The opening lines set up a concept of time stretching backward out of sight. In terms of such a concept, St. Erkenwald lived not long ago and Christ not a very long while before that. The end of the poem, on the other hand, focuses on "the everlasting life, the life without end," introducing a concept of time stretching forward out of sight. The contrast of finite and infinite time and space is central to the organization of the poem, accounting not only for the historical material and the bishop's prayer for more than mortal wisdom, but also for specific images throughout—the runes on the coffin, undecipherable to mortal reason; the crowd which gathers like "all the world … in an instant"; the chess image in which, when the human mind is checkmated, God moves one pawn and recasts the whole game. At last this contrast between the finite and the infinite becomes the poet's artistic justification of the miracle. And so what might have been merely ornamental in the work of another medieval poet becomes in the hands of the Gawain-poet both the thing said and the way of saying it.

For the Gawain-poet, plots, images, and certain rhetorical devices were also largely a matter of convention. It has often been pointed out that the two most elaborately developed symbols in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the shield and the girdle, are standard devices for characterization in medieval poetry. In the alliterative Morte Arthure (almost certainly earlier than the Gawain) shields are the usual means of identifying a knight's particular virtues; and in The Parliament of the Three Ages, as in Chaucer and elsewhere, the girdle or waistband (on which one hangs one's moneybags) is the usual detail singled out to suggest a man's concern with possessions. But the Gawain-poet's use of the standard devices is ingenious. The emblem on Arthur's shield in the Morte Arthure, a picture of the Virgin, is transferred to the inside of Gawain's shield to show, as the poet explicitly tells us, the source of Gawain's inner strength; and for the usual gryphon on the outside of Gawain's shield the poet substitutes a pentangle indicative of his strength—that is, his virtues—as seen from outside. With the shield, as Donald R. Howard has pointed out, Gawain serves the world but stands aloof from it; with the girdle he serves himself.⁶ No such ingenious use of the two images, and no such juxtaposition of the two, can be found outside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Borrowing plots, descriptions, even especially elegant lines from the work of other poets was standard practice in the Middle Ages—as it has been among good poets of almost every age, for that matter. At its best this borrowing becomes imperatorial confiscation. Thus Chaucer seized Boccaccio's elegant and slight Il Filostrato and transformed it into the greatest tragic poem in English; and thus Shakespeare transformed the curious tragedies of earlier poets into the world's most powerful modern drama.

The artistry in poetic borrowing can also lie in adapting borrowed material to its new context without obscuring its meaning in the original context, for here the poet's object is not to confiscate but rather to enrich meaning by playing one context against another. Only if the reader remembers that the revels of Arthur's court are usually licentious can he see the humor in the poet's pious celebration of the Christmas revels which open the Gawain.⁷ It is as though the revels were being seen through the eyes of the innocent Sir Gawain himself. It is impossible, however, to know the extent to which the Gawain-poet's work is meant to operate in this way. Knowing virtually nothing of his audience, we cannot know how much knowledge the poet was able to assume; and knowing almost as little of his immediate sources, we cannot be perfectly sure how much of the given poem is the poet's own. Scholarship on the Gawain-poet has veered between two extremes: the tendency to attribute nearly everything to the poet himself and the tendency to trace all virtues to a hypothetical source.

Undoubtedly our best clue to the poet's method is provided, as Professor Mabel Day has sensibly suggested, by the homiletic Purity, for here we do know most, if not all, of the poet's sources. We find in Purity the clear influence of the Roman de la Rose, Mandeville's Travels (in the French version), Cursor Mundi, The Knight of La Tour-Landry (probably in French), and the Vulgate Bible. In a complicated plot made up of three linked biblical episodes the poet brings these materials together, associating each episode with the other two by means of puns and verbal repetitions, and at the end of the poem he tells us that he has preached "in three ways" the same moral lesson. Since puns and verbal repetitions of the same sort appear in the other poems, we may safely suppose that he combined other materials with equal freedom and ingenuity in Gawain, Patience, the Pearl, and St. Erkenwald.

If we make this supposition, we can make guesses concerning the extent to which the poet extended or modified tradition in such poems as the Gawain, even though the exact sources are unknown. In the Gawain two old motifs appear, the Beheading Game (parts 1 and 4) and the Temptation (part 3).⁸ Both the general outline of the Green Knight's challenge and the general outline of the Temptation are common, the first deriving from a Cuchulain legend of about the ninth century, the second perhaps deriving from the thirteenth-century French Yder. The parallels are slight between the Gawain and known versions of the two motifs, especially with regard to the Temptation, and many details in the Gawain-poet's treatment of the two motifs come from sources which have nothing to do with either. Given the poet's combination of diverse materials in Purity and given the obvious coherence of the Gawain, we have every reason to suppose that the combination of diverse materials here is the poet's own work and not, as Kittredge suggested in 1916, work done in a lost French original. Certain details are unquestionably of English origin (the legendary founding of Britain and the arming of Gawain); and a few detasils are clearly peculiar to our poet (for instance, the stanzas on the turning of the seasons at the beginning of part 2). And to the extent that all elements in the poem are interrelated to form a coherent and balanced whole—both literal and symbolic—from which no part can be removed without serious damage to the poem on both levels, we can be absolutely certain that the interrelationship, together with the resulting aesthetic effect, is to be credited to the Gawain-poet himself. Once thes structure of the poem has been understood, once it has been recognized that we are dealing here not with borrowing but with total transformation of old material, the search outside the poem for the poem's meaning becomes pure pedantry. But internal analysis does have a limitation, nevertheless. What it cannot show, and what must therefore be left to the scholarship of the future, is the straight or ironic play of text against source. Reading the Gawain may be roughly equivalent to reading "The Waste Land" without knowledge of Eliot's sources.

Perhaps the single most important set of poetic conventions open to the medieval poet came from the poetry of courtly love. The central metaphor in the Divine Comedy, the identification of Beatrice as the Neoplatonic Christian image of the ideal—Truth, Beauty, Goodness—derives from this poetry. Chaucer's dream-visions, Troilus, and much of the Canterbury Tales all draw from the same well. A good deal of the Gawain-poet's meaning will escape us if we are not familiar with the common devices used in the poetry of courtly love. Take, for example, the conventional love bower or garden. In the Book of the Duchess, the dreamer comes upon a "floury grene" which is

Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete,
With floures fele, faire under fete,
And litel used, hyt semed thus;
For both Flora and Zephirus,
They two that make floures growe,
Had mad her dwellynge ther, I trowe;
For hit was, on to beholde
As thogh the erthe envye wolde
To be gayer than the heven,
To have moo floures, swiche seven
As in the welken sterres bee.
Hyt had forgete the povertee
That wynter, thorgh hys colde morwes,
Had mad hyt suffre, and his sorwes,
All was forgeten, and that was sene.
For al the woode was waxen grene.…
[Book of the Duchess, ll. 399-414]

The same sort of garden is to be found in the Roman de la Rose, in Dante, and in a hundred other places. It is a garden from which mutability has been banished—or rather, one is usually given to understand, a garden from which mutability appears to have been banished. The garden looks back to the unfallen Paradise, a poetic subject at least as old as the Ave Phoenice, source of the Old English Phoenix.⁹ It represents Nature at her best, and so it contrasts both with Nature as we usually see her and with the immutable idea of which Nature is a corporeal embodiment. If we are familiar with this conventional garden, there is a beautiful irony for us in that passage in Patience where Jonah, sheltered from the burning sun by a lovely green bower of woodbine which God has erected around him, thinks of his arbor as a lover's bower. God is indeed Jonah's lover—a point poor Jonah misses—and this bower, like every lover's paradise, is a mutable thing which can be thrown to the ground in an instant. Looking at the bower in worldly terms, Jonah puts his hopes on false felicity. In the Pearl the idea of the earthly paradise is explored in quite different terms. The poem opens in a garden which is the conventional love garden in all respects but one: it is a real arbor, where mutability has not been banished. The tension between the actuality of the garden and the idealism of the convention suggested by its description is moving in itself, and it also prepares for the narrator's vision of the true Paradise in his dream. But the poet's most complex treatment of the conventional garden comes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The white castle Gawain comes upon, surprisingly, in the center of a grim, dark forest, is a paradise of ambiguous meaning as are most such paradises, but ambiguous in unusually ominous ways. It is at once an unfallen Paradise, a factitious heaven, a garden of Venus, the land of Faery, Asgaard, and the haunt of Druids.

The garden is only one of many conventional devices from courtly-love poetry used in old or new ways in the work of the Gawain-poet. Another is the formal paradox familiar to every reader through Renaissance Petrarchan poetry or through Chaucer. Chaucer's Black Knight says:

My song ys turned to pleynynge,
And al my laughtre to wepynge,
My glade thoghtes to hevynesse;
In travayle ys myn ydelnesse
And eke my reste; my wele is woo,
My good ys harm, and evermoo
In wrathe ys turned my pleynge
And my delyt into sorwynge.…
[Book of the Duchess, ll. 599-606]

This formal balance of opposing concepts is used by the Gawain-poet when Sir Abraham bargains with God to save Sodom; it is transformed into a vehicle for strong emotion in the dreamer's plea for the compassion of his pearl; and it becomes rich comedy in Sir Gawain's sophistical attempts to fend off the amorous lady of the castle. Still another conventional element is, of course, the device of the dream-vision itself. The device is obviously central in the Pearl, and combining with traditions of fairy magic it becomes the basis of the mystery and uncertainty which pervade the Gawain. When the Green Knight enters King Arthur's court all sounds die out as if everyone in the hall had suddenly slipped off into sleep, and the green man seems a magical phantom or an illusion. By means of a pun, Middle English prayere, the Gawain-poet leaves a trace of doubt whether the castle in the forest is "pitched on a prairie" or pitched "on a prayer." That trace of doubt is perhaps strengthened by our recollection that dream paradises so often come after pathless wandering in great, dark forests; and for the poet's immediate audience that hint may have been further reinforced by the recognition that whereas the general area of Gawain's search and the Green Chapel to which he comes in the end were real and recognizable places, there had never in the memory of man been a castle or any sign of one in the area.¹⁰ On the other hand, the castle does not go up in smoke as Morgan's phantom castles ordinarily do. Nothing is certain. That is an important part of the meaning of the poem.

As all we have said thus far should suggest, another very important aspect of medieval poetic convention is what we may call the idea of symbolic equation. The idea is rooted in the medieval view of the cosmos. Scholastic thinkers speak of two "books" by which man may learn his road to salvation. One is Nature; the other, Scripture. Before the Fall, man could þe ceive God's revelation of Himself directly, by looking at His created works. But, as Bonaventura puts it, "turning himself away from the true light to mutable goods, he was bent over by his own sin, and the whole human race by original sin, which doubly infected human nature, ignorance infecting man's mind and concupiscence his flesh."¹¹ Now Nature carries, for man, only "vestiges" or "traces" of the divine hand, and to be saved he needs a clearer text, one which, incidentally, helps him to understand that first text, Nature, which has become hopelessly obscured. The clearer text is Scripture, God's new revelation not only of Himself but also of what he wished man to see, in allegorical and moral terms, when he looked at the oak tree, the serpent, the rose. As elements of God's self-revelation, all superficially similar things in Nature may be seen as types of one another and of something higher; thus (as the earlier exegetes had it) all Nature is a vast array of emblems.

The literary importance of patristic exegesis may easily be exaggerated or misunderstood, but exegetical symbolism can by no means be dismissed as a possibility within any given poem by anyone seriously concerned with the meaning of medieval poetry to its immediate audience. Indeed, the basic technique has come down to us practically unchanged in the work of, for instance, Melville and Faulkner. Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante—poets of enormous influence in their day—all subscribed to a theory of criticism developed roughly in terms of the three-fold system of the exegetes. They would all differ profoundly, however, with the New Exegetes. Boccaccio, for instance, denies that any good poet would ever intentionally introduce obscurities for the purpose of withholding his meaning from any reader,¹² and neither in his criticism (in the Genealogy of the Gods) nor in his own poetry does he apply this system or any other system rigidly. But the early Italian poets were unanimous in their opinion that good poetry was inspired and that the method of poetry was the method of the Holy Ghost. Indeed, the theory that poetry comes from God was still vital enough in Sidney's day to provide the first argument in his Defence, though Sideny was not much interested in what was earlier supposed to be the exact method of divine inspiration.

It is a commonplace that the Middle Ages saw the world as ordered, but in a practical way we might as easily characterize the medieval world as one of celestial disturbances, terrestrial plagues, witch-hunts, slums, devastating fires, crop failures, earthquakes, physical and mental sickness, bloodletting, peasant revolts, corruption in church and state, wolves and boars a mile outside London, and, above all, endless, apparently hopeless, thoroughly wasteful war. Men have always known that what is is not necessarily what ought to be, and disorder seen on every hand heightens man's need for a conceptual scheme of order. On the basis of divine revelation and the essential, though not always evident, order in Nature—the regular succession of generation, corruption, and regeneration—the Middle Ages worked out its schemes. The best minds of the period went into the work, drawing hints wherever they might be found—from Aristotle, from fragmentary third-hand accounts of Plato's thought, from Vergil, Ovid, Statius, old mythologies, and, above all, of course, from the Bible.

That the Bible was directly inspired by God went without saying; and since the Bible, the work of perfect wisdom, had obvious obscurities and seeming contradictions, it was clear that when speaking to man, God chose to speak in dark conceits. The whole truth, embracing infinite time and space, would doubtless be too much for mortal minds. Moreover, a man had to prove himself worthy of truth; it must not come to him easily but must follow from diligence.¹³ Man's work, then, was to decipher as well as possible the dark conceits of God and thus to discover as much as he could of the total system. What medieval exegetes found, playing one scriptural text against another in accordance with the accepted principles of classical Greek literary criticism, was that, like ancient Greek poetry, the Bible worked on several levels—sometimes on one level at a time, sometimes on all levels at once. The levels were these:¹⁴

1. The Literal or Historical Sense. On the first and most obvious level, the intent of Scripture is that which the words signify in their natural and proper acceptation, as in John 10:30, "I and the Father are one," in which passage the deity of Christ and His equality with God the Father are distinctly asserted. The literal sense has also been called the grammatical sense, the term grammatical having the same reference to the Greek language as the term literal to the Latin, both referring to the elements of a word. When words are taken metaphorically or figuratively, diverted to a meaning they do not naturally carry but which they nevertheless intend, as when the properties of one person or thing are attributed to another, they operate not on the literal level but on some other. Thus the adjective "hardness" applies literally to stone, figuratively to the heart. On the literal level, those narratives which purport to be true accounts of historical events are to be read as certain history; but this is not to say that they may not operate on other levels as well. When the Jews are said to "possess" or "inherit the land"—phrases of frequent occurrence in the Old Testament—the literal meaning is that the Jews are to hold secure and undisturbed possession of their promised land; but the phrases have figurative meaning as well, having reference to the Christian's possession of the life everlasting.

2. The Allegorical Sense (sometimes treated as merely a mode of the anagogical and tropological senses). On a second level, Scripture signifies, besides or instead of the literal meaning, things having to do with faith or spiritual doctrine. It is this level that is most likely to embarrass the modern reader, for it frequently does violence to obvious surface meaning. And it is their insistence upon reading medieval poetry as though it worked in this way and in no other that is most trouble-some in the interpretations of the New Exegetes, Robertson and Huppé, for instance.¹⁵ Bonaventura's comments upon Christ's cry on the cross, "I thirst," will serve to illustrate. Bonaventura writes:

Earlier, as the hour of His passion was approaching, the most sweet Jesus fell prostrate and prayed, saying: "Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from Me." He said this not once but a second and a third time; and by the cup He was to drink He meant the passion He was to suffer. Now, having emptied this same cup of the passion, He says: "I thirst." What does He mean?

Before tasting the cup, O good Jesus, You prayed that it might be taken away from You; but now, after emptying it, You thirst. How wonderful this appears! Was Your cup perhaps filled with the wine of delight, instead of humiliation and the worst bitterness? Emphatically not! It was filled with the most withering shame. This should not produce thirst, but rather aversion to drink.

When, before You suffered, You prayed that the cup be removed from You, we must believe it was not a refusal of the passion itself. You had come for this very suffering, without which mankind would not have been saved. But it might have been said that, true man though You are, since You are also one with God, the bitterness of the passion did not really affect You. That is why You prayed once, twice, and even three times that the cup be removed from You: to prove to the doubters how supremely bitter was Your suffering.… By praying before You suffered that this cup might be taken away from You, and by saying, after it was emptied: "I thirst," You showed us how immeasurable is Your love. For this seemed to mean: Although My passion was so dreadful that, because of My human sensibility, I prayed to be saved from it, My love for you, O man, triumphed even over the torments of the cross, making Me thirst for more and greater tortures, if need be.…¹⁶

It is important to resist the temptation to dismiss commentary of this sort as lunacy, childishness, or pernicious sophistry. The practice of contemporary writers of prose fiction leads us closer, perhaps, than some generations have been to the symbolic mode of thought common in the Middle Ages, but we are nevertheless sufficiently committed to the literal or realistic to be made uncomfortable by such insistent allegorical reading. If we were in the habit of finding "signs" or "figures" all around us as some medieval people clearly were, or if, like James Joyce, we were accustomed to seeing profound philosophical significance, not mere linguistic accident, in puns, we would probably find interpretation like Bonaventura's somewhat less far-fetched than we do. If he can avoid pursuing the principle intemperately, the student of medieval literature will do well to bear in mind Augustine's warning that

when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is the understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the pursuit of the letter. He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else.¹⁷

The corollary to this is, "Every analysis begins from things which are finite, or defined, and proceeds in the direction of things which are infinite, or undefined."¹⁸ (The italics are mine.) One must watch for signs, particularly where no other explanation will account for details within the poem, but one should not abandon the literal level until forced to do so by the text.

3. The Anagogical or "Typical" Sense. On a third level, objects, actions, or prophetic visions secretly represent things present or future; more particularly, events recorded in the Old Testament presignify or adumbrate events related in the New Testament. The exegetes declare that, rightly understood, Moses' story is parallel to the stories of Adam, Noah, Joseph, Christ. The water which gushes from the rock Moses strikes is a "type" or presignification of the blood and water which gush from Christ's side; it is obversely analogous to the flood of Noah's time and symbolically analogous to the flood of sin in which man was drowned with the fall of Adam (the fiery lake in St. Erkenwald); and it is analogous to the flood of grace from the throne of God (first seen in the visions of Ezekiel), introduced on earth by the Holy Ghost (cf. light and water imagery in the Pearl). The job of patristic exegesis was to determine the exact nature of the relationships, and the result of exegesis was an elaborate symbology (or "typology") in which, for instance, grapes, wine, blood, wheat, bread, the lamb, the lily, the rose, the pearl, the lion, the falcon, the temple, the number eight, and so forth, become emblematic of Christ or attributes of Christ. Appearing in paintings, church windows, fretwork, sermons, and popular songs, this system of relationships comes to be—at least potentially—the shared tradition of all medieval men and thus material for poetry. Within the framework of typology the poet has two alternatives. He may retell biblical stories, introducing new typic images or situations which further elaborate or extend an orthodox typic interpretation; or he may introduce into a non-biblical story images or situations which establish a biblical parallel or group of parallels and which thus encourage an allegorical reading of the otherwise realistic or literal story.

4. The Moral or Tropological Sense. On the final level, Scripture tells us of the progress of the soul: the nature of man before and after the Fall, the conditions of his salvation, and the terms and impediments of redemption. The parable of the talents, for example, shows on the tropological level (according to one account) that the duties which men are called to perform are suited to their situations and the talents which they have received, that whatever a good man possesses he has received from God, together with the ability to improve that good, and that the grace and temporal mercies of God are suited to the power a man has of improving his talents.

But there is more to medieval symbolism than the system of the exegetes. Classical philosophy and feudalism introduce complications. Aristotle's basically Platonic notion of order extending from a Prime Mover through various natures or, to use the English word, kinds, became in the Middle Ages "plenitude," the scheme founded on the view that everything that could be created had been created, completing the whole range of the possible from best (the angels) to worst (the basest form of earth). The whole scheme of plenitude can be divided into discrete categories, the links of the so-called great chain of being, and within each category of Nature can be found another hierarchy from best to worst: the angels, carefully ranked from the Virtues of Heaven down, are higher than men, who are also carefully ranked from king to serf; eagles are higher than ducks; lions are higher than cows; roses are higher than brambles; gold is higher than lead. Given such hierarchies, it becomes possible to identify a station in one hierarchy in terms of the corresponding station of some other. A king might be emblematically represented by an eagle or by gold; God, or some attribute of God, might be represented by a crown or, as in Dante and Chaucer, an eagle.

Luckily for poets, the idea of equation was not altogether rigid. Certain emblems—particularly those having Scripture as their basis—tended to be of fixed significance; but whereas Chaucer's eagles in the Parliament of Fowls had to be eagles, to his goose and turtle-dove, for instance, he could assign meanings of his own, based on his private intuition of what geese and turtledoves would be if they were people.

Medieval symbolism is further complicated by heraldry with all its monsters, lions, deer, boars, birds, fish, reptiles, insects, plants, flowers, rocks, each with its specific meaning, and complicated also by the "language and sentiment of flowers," whereby the soldier or lover might send quite complicated messages in a simple bouquet. Still another complication cornes through courtly love, a system developed by analogy to feudalism and Scholastic Neoplatonism. If the mistress is identified, in jest or in earnest, with God or the Supreme Good, and if Love is treated as a feudal lord, all symbols applicable to Christianity or feudalism may be transferred to the scheme of love.

The modern reader may well inquire how he is to make sense of poetry written for an audience which took all this symbolism for granted. For the most part he probably cannot without the help of scholars. But great poetry operates on the literal as well as on symbolic levels. One need not know heraldry to understand the importance and even, in a general way, the nature of the lady's temptation of Sir Gawain, and one need not know about jewel symbolism to sense the power of the vision which concludes the Pearl. The discovery of symbolic reinforcement and enrichment of the poet's literal narrative is not a starting point but a time for refining interpretation.

Finally, though, one does want to know what the Gawain-poet's symbols mean and the extent to which his handling of symbols is merely conventional. Where scholars can offer no sure explanations, the meanings of symbols—indeed, the extent to which the poems are symbolic—must be a matter of personal conjecture. As for the poet's contribution to tradition, we know at least this: most of the identifiable symbolism to be found in the Pearl, Purity, Patience, and St. Erkenwald can be found outside the work of the Gawain-poet; but the transitions from one symbolic identification to another and the personal emotion which charges the symbolic identifications are certainly the poet's own contributions. The symbolism in the Gawain gives more trouble. Structure points to possible symbolic identifications, but just what the identifications may mean no one has so far shown convincingly. The armor and appearance of the Green Knight are described in detail in part 1 ; in part 2, the arming of Gawain is developed in a parallel way; in part 3, Gawain is dressed up for Christmas festivities; and in part 4, the arming of Gawain is described once again. So far we have little idea what, if anything, the ritualistic armings mean. Critics have had just as much trouble with the Green Knight himself. How close was the poet to his ultímate mythical source (Gawain as sungod)?¹⁹ Did he intend a direct identification of the Green Knight as the "green man"? What is the meaning of the poet's consistent characterization of the Green Knight as a sophisticated adult with a keen sense of humor, a man thoroughly unlike those overly earnest "beardless babes," King Arthur and his court? Is there any significance in the fact that the huge knight's colors are green, gold, and red? And what is the significance of his hunting trips? It is possible to work out by internal analysis convincing answers to many of these questions, but the answers remain conjectural.

Notes

1. Most scholars agree that one of the six stanzas in the fifteenth group of linked stanzas was meant to be canceled or revised out.
2. It has recently been argued that the "garland" in stanza 99 is not, as Gordon thought, "a metaphorical description of the heavenly procession," and not, in fact, a garland at all, but a crown, symbol, like Dante's ghirlande, of the New Jerusalem. It is surely both and thus the earliest example of this later conventional image in English poetry. The New Jerusalem and the blessed or the elevated Church are interchangeable terms in exegetical writing, and the shifting symbolic identifications of the pearl image in this poem would support a view of other symbols in the poem as having double or triple meaning. The argument that the procession is not circular carries no weight (there is no evidence either way—except, perhaps, for the moon image, which supports the view that the procession is circular). We are told that the whole celestial city is filled. More important, the shifting imagery throughout, from the mutable to the immutable, the natural to the supernatural (see my interpretation of the poem), justifies the guess that individual pearls (liberated, pure souls), formerly mutable flowers, become, together, a garland of perfected flowers (flowers "figured" out of pearls) and become, finally, the heavenly city itself. Concerned as he seems to be with the Platonic image of unity and completion, the sphere, the poet would be unlikely to miss a chance of introducing one more circle.
3. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), p. 52.
4. Quoted by Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 63.
5. Ibid.
6. Donald R. Howard, "Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain" Speculum, XXXIX (July, 1964), 425-33.

7. If we think of the poems in the Pearl manuscript as a unified group, then the parallel description of the revels at Belshazzar's court in Purity would also tend to cast ironic light over the revels at Camelot. The Belshazzar passage may be sufficient in itself to account for the irony, without recourse to a theory that allusion is involved. But if the concluding section of Purity was written after Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a possibility very attractive in certain respects, and at any rate one we cannot rule out, we are back where we began.

   For a brilliant, partly conjectural treatment of ironic allusion and parody in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 52-129.

8. For a discussion of the origins of the story, see the introduction by Mabel Day and Mary S. Serjeantson to Gollancz' edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, pp. xx ff.
9. See J. A. W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 62 ff.
10. See Professor Day's discussion of the Green Chapel in Gollancz' Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, pp. xix-xx. The evidence for this identification of the mound is strong but not conclusive.
11. Bonaventura, The Mind's Road to God, trans. George Boas (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1953), p. 9.
12. See Boccaccio on Poetry, ed. C. G. Osgood (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1930), p. 60.
13. See, for example, Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, p. 37.
14. There are two main traditions. For Gregory the Great, Jerome, and Hugh of St. Victor, among others, Scripture works on three levels—the literal, the allegorical, and the tropological (in this formulation, the allegorical is a mode of the anagogical); for Bede, Augustine, and others, Scripture works on the four levels I have outlined in the Introduction. The difference is merely clerical, since identical interpretations might be catalogued in either way. It might be mentioned that poets seem to favor the three-level system; at any rate that is the system expounded by Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante.
15. See Professor E. Talbot Donaldson's opposition to the method of patristic exegesis in his "Patristic Exegesis: The Opposition," Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 1-26.
16. The Works of Bonaventure, trans. Jose de Vinck (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1963), I, 79-80.
17. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, p. 84.
18. Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon, p. 92.
19. For an argument that the poet was very close indeed to his mythic source, see John Speirs' interpretation of the poem in Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), pp. 215 ff.