PEARL, THE. The Middle-English poem known as "Pearl" or "The Pearl" is preserved in the unique ms. Cotton Nero Ax at the British Museum ; in this volume are contained also the poems "Cleanness," "Patience," and "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight." All the pieces are in the same handwriting, and from in ternal evidences of dialect, style and parallel references, it is now generally accepted that the poems are all by the same author. One other alliterative poem, "Sir Erkenwald," may be assignable to him. The ms., which is quaintly illustrated, belongs to the end of the 14th or the beginning of the 15th century.
"Pearl" is a poet's lament for the loss of a girl-child, "who lived not upon earth two years"; the poet is evidently the child's father. In grief he visits the little grave, and there in a vision be holds his Pearl, now transfigured as a queen of heaven—he sees her beneath "a crystal rock," beyond a stream ; the dreamer would fain cross over, but cannot. From the opposite bank Pearl, grown in wisdom as in stature, instructs him in lessons of faith and resignation, expounds to him the mystery of her transfiguration, and leads him to a glimpse of the New Jerusalem. Suddenly the city is filled with glorious maidens, who in long procession glide towards the throne, all of them clad in white, their robes pearl bedecked like Pearl herself. There he sees, too, " his little queen." A great love-longing possesses him to be by her. He must needs plunge into the stream that sunders him from her. In the very effort the dreamer awakes, to find himself resting upon the mound where his Pearl had "strayed below." "While the main part of the poem," according to Gollancz, "is a paraphrase of the closing chapters of the Apocalypse and the par able of the Vineyard, the poet's debt to the Romaunt of the Rose is noteworthy, more particularly in the description of the won derful land through which the dreamer wanders; and it can be traced throughout the poem, in the personification of Pearl as Reason, in the form of the colloquy, in the details of dress and ornament, in many a characteristic word, phrase and reference. `The river from the throne,' in the Apocalypse, here meets 'the waters of the wells' devised by Sir Mirth for the Garden of the Rose. From these two sources, the Book of Revelation. with its almost Celtic glamour, and The Romaunt of the Rose, with its almost Oriental allegory, are derived much of the wealth and brilliancy of the poem. The poet's fancy revels in the richness of
the heavenly and the earthly paradise, but his fancy is subordi nated to his earnestness and intensity." Leading motifs of "Pearl" are to be found in the Gospel—in the allegory of the merchant who sold his all to purchase one pearl of great price, and in the words, so fraught with solace for the child bereft, "for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." Naturally aris ing from the theme, and from these motifs, certain theological problems of the time are treated perhaps too elaborately.
The poem consists of Tor stanzas, each of 12 lines, with four accents, rhymed ab, ab, ab, ab, bc, bc; the versification combines rhyme with alliteration; trisyllabic effects add to the easy move ment and lyrical charm of the lines. Five stanzas (in one case six), with the same refrain, constitute a section, of which ac cordingly there are 20 in all, the whole sequence being linked to gether by the device of making the first line of each stanza catch up the refrain of the previous verse, the last line of the poem re-echoing the first line. The author was not the creator of this form, nor was he the last to use it.
By piecing together personal and other indications to be found in the poems an imaginary biography of the unknown poet may be constructed. It may be inferred that he was born about 1330-40, somewhere in Lancashire, or a little to the north; that he de lighted in open-air life, in woodcraft and sport; that his early life was passed amid the gay scenes that brightened existence in mediaeval hall and bower; that he availed himself of opportunities of study, theology and romance alike claiming him; that he wedded, and had a child perhaps named Margery or Marguerite —the Daisy or the Pearl—at whose death his happiness drooped and life's joy ended.
It is noteworthy that soon after 1358 Boccaccio wrote the Latin eclogue "Olympia" in memory of his young daughter Violante. A comparative study of the two poems is full of interest ; the direct influence of the Latin on the English poem is doubtful, although "Pearl" may be later than "Olympia." See Pearl, an English Poem of the Fourteenth Century, edited, with a modern Rendering, by I. Gollancz (1891; with Olympia, 1921) ; Sir Erkenwald, ed. I. Gollancz, Select Early English Poems (1922) ; Facsimile of ms. Cotton Nero Ax (E.E.T.S., 1923) ; Cam bridge History of English Literature, vol. i. ch. xv. (bibl.). (I. G.)