‘This makeles perle, that boght is dere,
The jueler gave for all his god,
Is like the reme of hevens clere
(So sayd the Fader of folde and flod):
For hit is wemles, clene and clere,
And endeles rounde, and blythe of mod,
And commune to all that ryghtwys were.
Lo, even in-myddes my brest hit stode …’ (733–40)
The biblical simile is here developed by the addition of other attributes (besides value) shared by a matchless pearl and the kingdom of heaven. Perfection, flawlessness and circular infinitude (737–8) are logical enough; but blythe of mod and common possession by all who lived worthy lives (738–9) are not attributes of a pearl, and become so only when the pearl set on the girl’s breast is pointed to (740) as if it were the makeles perle of the parable (733) given visible reality: it now clearly betokens the bliss inherited by her purity of heart or mod and is thus (as is later confirmed: 1103–4) the commune possession of all the brides of the Lamb.
These lines herald a change. The father has now not spoken for some 150 lines (601–744). His earlier ‘argument’ with her – characterized on both sides by the exchange of textual authorities (especially scriptural ones) – is reminiscent of Middle English debate verse (which was in turn modelled on academic debate). However, the debate turns out to have been, not the horizontal one found in such poems as The Owl and the Nightingale or Winner and Waster (where there is no a priori inequality in the credibility of the disputants), but a vertical one, in which one of the disputants (here, the erring mortal) is, however persuasive, by definition wrong if he contradicts the other (a beatified soul with perfect understanding: 859). When the father speaks again at 745 it is not to press or even to concede the point he had been arguing, but to ask a wondering question that suggests he is in some sense seeing the girl for the first time, and which introduces a new mood (of marvelling, rather than resistant, incomprehension). This in turn prompts a modulation in mode – as the dialogue is resumed, not now in the mode of a debate, but in the question-and-answer form (found in such medieval texts as Sidrak and Bokkus or Dives and Pauper) that implies the unquestioned acceptance of the authority of the answerer. The question he puts to her (who is the author of your visible form and being?) is something a father could in no other context ask of his daughter, and here measures the distance he now senses between himself and his erstwhile child.
The change in his understanding is further suggested in other ways. For example, on its first appearance, the account had introduced the crown as something which the girl, no less than all the saved, enjoyed (447–8); but as the poem starts to direct itself towards the apocalyptic vision of heaven, she is introduced as one of the 144,000 brides of the Lamb in Revelation (785–7) and the crown as one of the attributes (virginity: 767) that qualifies her for inclusion in that divine élite. The two exegeses are not, strictly, absolutely compatible with one another, belonging rather to phases of the developing awareness of the child’s status in heaven: the first establishes her as qualifying for no less than others, despite her youth; the second corresponds to her emphasis (625–72) on the in fact superior claims of innocence over righteousness.
But the now humbler father finds her status as ‘bride’ of the Christ-Lamb no less problematic than he had her rank as ‘queen’ of heaven. The more corporate and less individual emphasis in the divine realm again proves resistant to mortal comprehension (for in the known world a crown and a wife imply singularity and superiority or selection over others). He therefore assumes she has ‘beaten’ a number of rival claimants: ‘stout and stif’, she managed to ‘depres’ [subjugate, overthrow, drive out] them all (777–80). The limitations and yet the inevitability of a ‘human’ perspective on the divine are implicitly recognized in the touching comedy of these words which cast the girl as a kind of Brünnhilde – whose triumphs are recorded with an audible touch of paternal pride by a father obviously not displeased at the idea of his little girl having sturdily elbowed aside all the opposition to land herself the most eligible bachelor in the cosmos. His desire to know why the Lamb chose her is one of a series of questions in which interest in the deity and the afterlife can emerge only out of an interest more specifically directed towards the lost daughter: what life does she lead (390–92), who made her and who is her consort (747, 771), what accommodation is provided for her and her fellow brides (925ff)? And his request to be shown the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem is one with a desire to view ‘thy blysful bour’ (964).
This last request to his daughter, that she might lead him to see her dwelling place, is thus like and unlike his first (389–92): it marks the culmination of a process in which his interest in the girl’s present state has led him from her to her wider context, to the Lamb (769ff) and now to heaven itself. For the girl partially succeeds in imposing the perspective she urges on her father: his interest should be, not in her, but in the glorious whole of which she is a part, a whole in which individual identity is subsumed. In a mark of that success, the poem now replays itself to produce a parallel to the earlier climactic vision of her, across the river that divides the mortal from the immortal realm, in a second vision, in which she is replaced by the heavenly city, which now is similarly seen across the river, having replaced her as the focus of the dreamer’s present preoccupation. The text now returns to the mode of visual description in a way that makes the culmination of this dream-vision a fusion of actual with intellectual ‘seeing’: in his closing vision of the heavenly city, which draws heavily and self-consciously on the Book of Revelation, the father sees his pearl, in an affirmation of the corporate nature of identity in heaven, in a group of 144,000 brides, all in identical attire, and all having eyes only for the Lamb.
But this God-centred perspective, the heavenly ‘view’ of things in which all individuality is sunk in a corporate charity (cf. 445–68), he can enjoy only briefly: with the unerring eye of a parent, he picks out from the crowd of queens ‘my little quene’ (1147) – and this fatally alters the perspective from divine to mortal and precipitates the end of the dream. The dreamer remains to the end a human, subject to mortal priorities and impulses, and – compared with St John’s Apocalypse – his vision of heaven is accordingly limited. His sight is a qualified knowledge only, not a complete ‘Revelation’: it is only sight, not entrance (966–8), sight that is brief and aborted, and, as the girl warns him, from the ‘outside’ only, not from the inside (969–70). Awareness of the strictly limited comprehension of the next world that can be gained by a mortal understanding is therefore a feature of the text that persists even into its culminating ‘vision’.
Recommended Further Reading: Kean 1967; Bishop 1968; Spearing 1970; Mann 1983; Aers 1993; Putter 1996: 147–98; Newman 2007; Gaylord 2009
Pearl
I
Perle, plesaunt to princes pay
To clanly close in gold so clere –
Out of orient, I hardily say,
Ne proved I never her precious pere:
5 So rounde, so reken in uch aray,
So smal, so smothe her sides were,
Wheresoever I jugged gemmes gay,