A comparison with the locus amoenus in Dunbar’s The Golden Targe reveals what is traditional and what new in Pearl. The Targe shares with Pearl ‘resplendent’ rocks (44; cf. Pe 159), water whose stones appear as ‘clere as stern in frosty nycht’ (36; cf. Pe 115–16), and which intensifies the dazzle (caused in Dunbar by the early-morning sun) so that ‘all the lake as lamp did leme of licht’ (30; cf. Pe 119). In Dunbar, too, a river provides the climax to a scene of what, in a series of similes and metaphors, are represented as ‘crystal’ beams, ‘beryl’ light, ‘pearly’ drops, ‘ruby’ dawn, ‘sapphire’ sky, etc. But, of course, in Pearl the jewels are real rather than figurative, and crystallize into actuality what would otherwise be the merely rhetorical: ‘crystal clyffes’ (74), tree-trunks ‘as blue as ble of ynde’ (76), leaves ‘as burnist sylver’ (77), riverbanks ‘As fildore fyne’ (106) could all be read as tropes of the kind found in The Golden Targe (and might well at first be read in exactly that way); but they demand to be taken more seriously when interspersed with unambiguous declarations that certain natural features were actually pearls or beryl (81–2, 110). Especially relevant are lines 113–18:
In the founs there stonden stones stepe,
As glent thurgh glasse that glowed and glyght,
As stremande sternes, when strothe-men slepe,
Staren in welkyn in wynter night;
For uch a pobbel in pole there pyght
Was emerad, saffer, or gemme gent …
We learn first that stones [pebbles] stonden [are situated or set] in the river-bed, appeared stepe [bright],6 and glittered like light refracted by glass and (as in Dunbar) like stars in a winter (i.e. frosty and clear) night. But the ensuing explanation (‘For’: 117) that each stone really was a precious gem gives added point to the similes and reveals a further potential meaning in the words stonden and stones in 113: ‘shine, stand out’7 and ‘precious stones’.
The main function of this landscape is to provide a setting in which the dreamer’s lost ‘pearl’ may most appropriately appear, and the third and fourth sections are about his vision of her. She materializes out of that part of the bejewelled landscape that is beyond the river and tormentingly perceptible but inaccessible to the dreamer (158–61). Shining white (163) in her resplendent setting (159), the colour of her array immediately suggests the lost ‘pearl’, as does the tense understatement (164) that she was not a complete stranger to the dreamer. The exact nature of the bereavement, however, is acknowledged to the audience (and even perhaps to the first-person speaker himself) only indirectly and gradually. The fact that his initial recognition leaves room for increasing degrees of certitude (167–8) is not immediately puzzling, given the factors of distance and dazzle; but those factors are complicated by a further ‘obscuring’ effect, for her form and appearance have undergone some transformation not at once as obvious to the audience, who do not yet know that the loved one the dreamer mourns was in fact a small child. Significantly, his first references to her in his vision are (161–2) as ‘faunt’8 and ‘mayden’ (which in Middle English had the additional sense of ‘young girl, daughter’). The following portrait, however, suggests an older girl than the two-year-old she is later revealed to have been when she died, an imposing lady who both is and is not the dreamer’s lost infant. She is possessed of adult poise and magnificence, the vocabulary of high courtliness, here and throughout, providing a means of expressing in human terms the girl’s present divine and spiritual refinement and grace: she is of ‘mensk’ (of status and presence deserving of ‘honour’) and ‘debonere’ (162), possessed of a social graciousness that, in this poem, is the sign of heavenly grace. But that same high courtliness assimilates the identifying nouns faunt and mayden into some loose courtly sense of ‘young lady’ and obscures from the reader their specificity, in which lies both the past and present real essence of this pearl: for it is later made clear that it is actually the very fact of her death as a faunt and mayden that gives her the presently visible form and elegance bestowed on her innocence by God (765–8).
The girl’s actions and the dramatic effects these have on the dreamer also suggest the close emotional bond that once connected the two (and in the case of the dreamer still does). The girl’s few collected and understatedly decorous gestures – raising her face (177), rising (191), walking a few steps down to the opposite bank (230) and delivering a composed curtsy and formal greeting (236–8) – are all performed against a tumult of strong emotional and sense impressions on the part of the beholder, through whose report they appear to occur in almost painfully slow motion (the four brief and sequential movements occupying almost 100 lines). The use of the historic present for the most unremarkable of her actions (‘veres’, 177, ‘Rises’, 191) contributes to the sense of suspense that arises from the contrast between the girl’s undramatic actions and the dramatic responses of the dreamer:
The more I frayste her fayre face,
Her figure fyne when I had fonte,
Such gladande glory con to me glace
As little before thereto was wont.
To calle her lyst con me enchace,
Bot baysment gave myn hert a brunt:
I saw her in so strange a place,
Such a bur myght make myn herte blunt. (169–76)
The inventiveness of the poet’s vocabulary is beautifully illustrated here: gladande glory is a concentrated expression that illustrates the important role played by present participles in the poet’s style and involves a novel extension to the sense of the word glory which is without parallel, but whose emotional logic is instantly comprehensible. By contrast with the French-derived glory, Germanic vocabulary is, here as elsewhere (cf. 17–18), the medium for forceful images expressing strong emotions (brunt, bur, blunt; cf. stonge at 179). The verb enchace (173) in the sense of ‘chase, pursue’ was a French-derived hunting term that occurs only here used metaphorically with an abstract noun (lyst) as subject. The conflicting emotions of 173–4 – where the mourner is both ‘chased’ by desire towards, and sent reeling back by shock from, the same quarter – also involve innovative applications of the words brunt [assault], bur [impetus, blow] and blunt [dull, stupid] to metaphorical (emotional) ‘shock’.
As she gets nearer to the dreamer, the girl comes into ever-clearer focus, and the generalizing phrase ‘figure fyne’ (170) leads into a highly detailed description of her pearl-studded clothing. Her curtsy at last confirms (though only indirectly) the ‘daughter’ indicated by the dreamer’s statement that she was someone ‘nearer’ to him than aunt or niece (233): obeisance and bearing the head were gestures of the deference due to parents from well-bred children (though these courtesies of ‘wommon lore’ (236) are ones the girl could scarcely have been old enough to acquire while alive). But when the headwear politely removed by a child is a crowne, the implied inferiority is obviously under some question. The oddly incongruous gesture marks both what the relationship had been and the radically changed terms on which the two now meet.
This change becomes very apparent in the dialogue that follows. The girl’s very first words are a correction (her father has not chosen his words, his ‘tale’, quite accurately: 257) – a self-possessedly polite correction it would be unnerving to hear from one’s own child, and one which redefines the daughterly deference (the Sir and ye) with which it is delivered. The father’s apology only lands him in further trouble, for, as she points out, he has in the course of apologizing committed, through lack of consideration, three solecisms in one breath. Her logical and systematic exposition of these (‘Thou says … An other … The thrid’: 295–9) has an almost comically schoolmistressy air which underlines the complete reversal of roles, between instructor and instructed, that has occurred.