The poet imposes on himself a demanding stanzaic rhyme-scheme (ababababbcbc), 1 with the added restriction that the c rhymes must be continued (because of the use of a refrain word) throughout each five-stanza group. In addition, most lines have alliteration, although Pearl (unlike the other poems in the manuscript) is not written in the alliterative metre as such (on which, see pp. xxi–xxvii). Quite apart from having a different rhythm (iambic), Pearl is not a poem in which alliteration is a condition of metricality, and it is not therefore found in each and every line; but it does make a significant contribution to the rich music of the verse of this poem.
These heavy formal constraints are met in large part by an exceptionally wide and varied vocabulary, a lexical competence both flexible and inventive. An English word-stock (inherited from Anglo-Saxon), incorporating a number of dialect words peculiar to the region of the North-West Midlands, is supplemented by words of Scandinavian etymology (more numerous in areas, such as this one, which had been part of the Danelaw than in, for instance, Chaucer’s London dialect); by a number of French-derived words which extensive exposure to spoken and written French put within the poet’s competence and understanding; by learned and technical words, both from the speculative and from the mechanical arts; and by the group of somewhat unusual and archaic words that formed a stock of ‘poetic diction’ traditionally used in verse written in the alliterative metre which the poet himself elsewhere uses (in Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain).2 An ear which had registered variant pronunciations current slightly outside his own dialect area (especially rather further north), and variant stress-positioning in French loan words (e.g. dàmysel, damysèlle), occasionally helps him to fulfilment of rhyming, metrical or alliterative patterns – practices to which other poets of this period occasionally had recourse.
The metre is iambic tetrameter: that is, four stressed syllables each separated from the next by an unstressed syllable. Clashing stress – i.e. two stressed syllables in succession without intervening unstressed syllable(s) – is markedly avoided. Since English is stress-timed, not syllable-timed, the pulse of the line is not affected by the occasional inclusion of more than one unstressed syllable in the ‘dips’ between the stresses. This in fact happens less often than might appear, since elision of vowels in unstressed syllables (especially before liquid or nasal consonants) is common in spoken English and is certainly to be assumed at a number of points in this text, as in the following lines, where the italicized vowels should not be sounded: ‘Of còuntes [countess], dàmysel, pàr ma fày’ (489); ‘Blòd and wàter of bròdë wòunde’ (650); ‘The apòstel in Apòkalypse in tème con tàke’ (944).3 The specific types of metrical variation in the first foot which iambic poets generally allowed themselves also occur: headless lines (lacking the initial unstressed syllable), as at 650 (quoted in the preceding sentence); lines beginning with a double dip (two unstressed syllables), as at 697 and 700; and lines with a reversed first foot (/x rather than x/), as at 542 and 543. One may also find the so-called ‘epic caesura’, where the third foot is reversed to place two stresses in a row in the middle of the line, with a slight pause for a syntactic break, grandeur and emphasis being often the result: ‘That àll the lògh [body of water] lèmëd of lìght’ (119).
The iambics will be for the most part perceptible to non-specialists, who will need to make only minor adjustments. Stress patterns in French-derived words, for instance, may be different in Middle English, as in ‘And burnist white was her vestùre’ (220). Final -e and final inflections such as -ed and -es should be pronounced where the metre requires: e.g. ‘Her kyrtel of self sutë schene’ (203); ‘The day was all apassëd date’ (540). Words such as ‘never’, ‘ever’, ‘heaven’ are often monosyllabic, as in ‘That ever I herde of speche spent’ (1132). Sithen [since], other [or] and also had monosyllabic counterparts for which there existed the variant forms syn, or and als, and these words we have therefore transcribed in whatever form the metre requires. We have also sometimes, metri causa, supplied a (historically justifiable) final -e, which does occur in the manuscript spelling on some occasion(s), though not at that point.4
To those unfamiliar with Middle English pronunciation, the rhymes may occasionally appear imperfect. But in fact the poet does not ‘cheat’ or resort to pararhyme or half rhyme, though sound changes that have occurred since his time may sometimes obscure the truth of his rhymes to modern English ears – to which, however, the poem’s musicality should not in any other way prove inaudible.
MODE AND MEANING
The poem begins in allegorical mode: the little girl’s death and burial are referred to consistently as the dropping of a pearl into the ground in an arbour (9–10, 30, 41; cf. 245, 1172–3). This serves to transform the distressing facts into images of courtly beauty, both jewels and arbours connoting wealth and gentle status. To the girl are attributed aspects of typical courtly beauty; and to the mourning father the suffering typical of the lover languishing from the ‘wound’ received from Love’s arrow (11). In fact, a first-time reader might well at this point assume the death to be that of a mistress.
Loose parallels for the mode and subject can be found in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, which also, in dream-vision form, addresses the grief of one who mourns a feminine paragon, termed ‘White’ in punning reference to her Christian name of Blanche (Duchess of Lancaster and wife to John of Gaunt). ‘Pearl’ might similarly be an allusion to the girl’s real name, Margaret or Margery (a Middle English synonym for ‘pearl’ used in the poem at 199, 206 and 1037). The two poems are obviously working in a broadly similar context of thought and literary form. The tropes introduced in the opening lines of Pearl (the arbour, the pearl, the courtly lady) are more than passing allusions. The narrator of the first section speaks as an expert jeweller when he says that he has weighed his pearl’s value against that of other pearls; the verbs he uses in this context (‘proved’, 4, ‘jugged’, 7, ‘set’, 8) could all be used in a professional sense of the assay and evaluation of minerals. Later in the poem (252–300) he calls himself a ‘jeweller’ and is addressed as such by his beatified daughter. Perhaps this term had some literal applicability to the mourner in his waking life. The attention given in the four poems to the products of goldsmithery (rings, girdles, gold, silver, enamel, jewels, ecclesiastical and domestic vessels) certainly does seem more recurrent and less local than the informed and appreciative interest which this poet brings generally to all varieties of skill and craft.
The setting of the arbour gives way in the second section to the dazzling surroundings of heaven. Both landscapes are exercises in the description of the locus amoenus [fair place].5 By his juxtaposition of two variations on the topos, the Pearl poet produces a contrast between the earthly place and its divine counterpart. In the mortal arbour, the emphasis falls on one element only of the locus amoenus: the sweet-scented flowers, which the poem associates with the cycles of growth and decay that characterize plant (and indeed all) life on earth (25–44). The heavenly locus, on the other hand, constructed of jewels, is associated with the brilliance and permanence of gems. And some features of the standard locus amoenus (such as birdsong and running water) are reserved for this second place, making it appear also as more refreshing and alive than the overpoweringly scented turf (57–8) of the first. The running water is given a climactic position in the description of the splendid landscape. It appears to be no sweetly purling brook such as is the fiumicello with its ‘tiny ripples’ that runs through Dante’s paradise (Purgatorio XXVIII.26, 35): it evidently has a swift current – cf. ‘scheres’ (107), ‘Swangeande’, ‘swepe’ (111), ‘raykande aryght’ (112) – and its vigorous motion complements the invigorating effect the place has on the dreamer, who is prompted to motion by it (101–2, 125–6). It provides, moreover, a climactic intensification of the bejewelled radiance of the landscape, a radiance now multiplied and refracted into a veritable ‘pool of light’ which elicits a cry of wonder from the dreamer as the refrain (on ‘adubbement’ [ornamentation]) is pushed into exclamatory mode: ‘Lord, dere was hit adubbement!’ (108).