The Pearl (circa 1380)
by The Pearl Poet
First Stanza
Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere:
Oute of oryent I hardly saye
Ne proved I never her precios pere.
So round, so reken in uche arraye,
So smal, so smothe her sydes were,
Quere-so-ever I jugged gemmes gaye
I sette her sengelye in synglere.
Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere
Thurgh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot.
I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere
Of that pryvy perle wythouten spot.
[Pearl, pleasing to a prince to set plainly in clear gold: from all the
pearls of the orient I never saw one like this. So perfectly round, so
radiant in any setting, so petite, so smooth-sided. Wherever I was able to
compare her with other precious stones I set her uniquely apart. Alas, I
lost her in a meadow: she fell from me to the earth, through 'gresse'. I
pine, mortally wounded by my love for that priceless, spotless pearl].
Comments:
This is only the first verse of a poem which is 101 stanzas in all. But the Pearl might be the most undervalued poem in the English language, and most of what I have to say turns on one word: 'gresse' in line 10. So perhaps some allowance can be made.
The Pearl is roughly contemporary with Chaucer, and is written in a North Western Middle English which modern readers sometimes find troublesome. It occurs in a manuscript with four other poems in the same dialect, and this is all the evidence we have for this moment in the history of English – so even scholars can't trace every word.
But the sense of the poem is clear. A medieval dream allegory, the Pearl opens with its narrator falling asleep in a meadow near where he lost his precious Pearl. In a dream his dead two year old daughter appears to him - she being the pearl he lost - and explains that she is happy in Paradise, and tells her father it would be better if he turned his life to love of God, rather than wasting so much effort in futile sorrow.
The poem is in a complex ten line stanza with lines that both rime and alliterate throughout. The stanzas in turn are arranged into paragraphs which share a repeating final line. The Pearl may be the most structurally complex poem in English, but one hardly notices its lapidary brilliance. The poem has a sort of slowness, which fits with its meditative subject matter - otherwise the Pearl poem wears its finery as easily as if it were royalty.
The poem subverts traditional christian symbology amusingly and naturally. The baby daughter scolds her father for his selfish grief, and gives him a thorough grounding in the ways of the Holy City. Daughters don't often scold fathers in poems this early, and it is almost as unusual to have the woman with all the clever lines of theology.
This first verse drops straight into the jewellery imagery which will stay throughout the poem; but - as we will find throughout the verse - the Pearl poet finds subtle ways to remind us that we are also talking about a baby girl who died.
Praising a pearl for its 'round'ness (line 5) is natural, for example; but babies are also bonniest when they are plump. And 'so smal, so smothe her sydes were' is possible for a pearl, but far more natural for a baby girl (and notice how 'smooth' applied to a pearl makes us think of looking at it, but a baby girl is smooth to touch).
The poet 'lest hyr in on erbere':- dropped her in a meadow. Later we will find that the meadow where the pearl dropped is a graveyard. But for now, all we are told is that 'thurgh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot'.
A first reading suggests that 'gresse' might be 'grass' here. The dreamer has dropped his pearl, and he cannot find it because the grass is so long and dense. This is a natural image: a pearl would be easy to lose in long grass. A little girl is also easy to lose in long grass, particularly in a graveyard - though in a slightly different sense. Much of the art of this poem is in the way it finds so many images that go in contradictory directions, with incompatible resonances. This process has started already.
But 'gresse' may not be 'grass' after all. The Pearl - like all poems of its era – was composed to be listened to, not read. An early audience would not know if this 'gresse' was 'grass' or 'grease' (as in 'greasy hands'). In speech there is no way of distinguishing 'grass' from 'grease' (or at least, probably not in this dialect). Where does understanding this word as 'grease' take us?
Firstly: if you have greasy hands, you are more likely to drop your pearl. The pear is a gemstone, it does not sweat, it does not get greasy. But the dreamer is only a father. He gets greasy. This makes it easy for him to drop the pearl which has become slippery. It is in the nature of being mortal (greasy) that you lose things.
But then the little girl was also greasy. A pearl has no exudations, but babies certainly do. It is in the dreamer's nature as a greasy mortal to drop and lose things. It is in the daughter's nature as a greasy baby to be dropped and lost beyond retrieval.
'Gresse' as 'grass' had two senses: grass can hide a pearl, grass can eat a baby. 'Gresse' as 'grease' again points two ways: the father is fleshly, which leaves him open to losing his little girl. The little girl is fleshly, so she will one day be lost.
But 'gresse' might be 'grace' too. The little girl's death was a catastrophe for her dreaming father (he still grieves for it years later, when he writes this poem). But we know that death is both God's will and God's gift. The poem as a whole is a poem of reconciliation: a poem where the father discovers that his daughter's death was a divine grace.
And later in the poem we will find that the little girl is happy in heaven: for her leaving the valley of the shadow was a blissful release. She will also show her father the Heavenly City, and promise him that one day they will be reunited there. For the father 'grace' is a burden he must learn to bear, for his daughter it is achieved salvation.
......
The Pearl is a frighteningly rich and difficult poem: the language is a strong disincentive for most readers. But there is a halfway decent modern version by Sophie Jewett, and even a free download audiofile for anyone who wants to listen to a poem intended to be listened to:
http://librivox.org/pearl-by-the-gawain-poet/
Poem Appreciation #6 - Pearl (The Pearl Poet)
Linear Mode
