This reversal is made palpable in many different ways, including forms of address and pronouns. Middle English had two singular pronouns of address: the informal thou and the formal ye (based on the plural form of address). The pearl maiden first addresses her father as ye (257), but soon moves to the unceremonious thou (264). When she does use ye, it is not the respectful singular, but an ordinary plural, as in ‘ye men’ (290), a dismissive usage that places him in a group she does not belong to. In these and other instances, ye stands in implicit or explicit (see 857–9) contrast with we, a pronoun the girl uses to group herself always with the blessed, never with her father. The father, on the other hand, uses the first-person plural pronoun to speak of the two of them;9 and he responds to his daughter’s rebukes like a humbled child, his respectful ye and your (371, 369) complementing the parental downward thou which his daughter uses when addressing herself to the wayward distress of her father. Only when his own human sense of justice is offended (by the queen’s status she claims for herself in heaven) does he briefly revert to the thou forms (473–4), which reflect his instinct to bring his daughter down from what he feels is a ‘height’ she has no claim to.
Reversal of the roles of child and parent is also apparent in the expression of emotional needs. In railing against his misfortune, the father understandably looks for her sympathy, but the girl, now integrated into a heavenly bliss which leaves her untouched and untouchable by human pain, has none to give, seeing in his distress only perverse blindness to the essential sources of true bliss and pointless opposition to the will of God. For the poem is not entirely consolatory in effect or purpose. Christian faith in an afterlife does not make bereavement any easier to bear, for it becomes clear to the father that, if his daughter lives on, she lives on in a form so different as to make no less absolute the loss of the child he knew, who really is gone for ever, and with whom he can never re-establish the relationship he once had. In fact, when he learns from his daughter that he cannot cross the river to join her, he delivers, against the felt hollowness of the Christian promise, its failure to reunite the bereaved with his lost one, a passionate outcry which is utterly persuasive in emotional terms and gains much of its plangent force from the connections and oppositions that the alliteration points up:
‘Demes thou me,’ quoth I, ‘my swete,
To doel agayn, then I dewyne.
Now have I founde that I forlete,
Schal I eft forgo hit ere ever I fyne?
Why schal I hit both mysse and mete?
My precious perle dos me gret pine:
What serves tresor bot gares men grete,
When he hit schal eft with tenes tyne? …
When I am partles of perles myne,
Bot durande doel what may men deme?’ (325–36)
The assurance of a life preserved and transformed beyond death which has been staged and visualized by the poem is found here simply to condemn or deme the mourner to the same doel [grief] in which to dewyne [languish] again (cf. 51, 11) that it had seemed to rescue him from (280). The alliterative antitheses founde/forlete (327) and mysse/mete (329) focus on the cruel delusion felt in an assurance which appears to restore what it in fact continues to withhold; and other-worldly life and language seem merely to mock the jeweller with the literal truth they turn out not to have: he is not to recover the pearl of whose preservation he had apparently been assured (257–8), and a jeweller dispossessed of jewels – partles of perles (335) – is necessarily condemned to durande doel (336).
The girl does have some limited success in getting her father to see things differently. Her arguments in section VI – for acceptance of what cannot be changed, and trust in the promises and mercy of the Christian God – were both available to the mourner prior to his vision, and he was not unaware of them, but had confessed himself unable to heed them (52–6); they now, however, gain a personalized force, when imagined as uttered in vigorous scorn by his own daughter, that makes them less unacceptable to a deeply personal loss than the depersonalized and depersonalizing wisdom of general dicta. Not wanting to embitter his relations with his child, the father attempts in section VII to re-establish communications on a more harmonious footing by changing to a non-contentious subject: he feels it would be some consolation to be able to picture how her days are spent (390–92) and reminds himself that his chief concern as a parent is (or ought to be), not for proximity, but for the welfare and honour of his child, which, in the present case, patently provide him with something to be happy about (393–6). But, far from establishing a safe common ground, her replies to these questions give rise to further contention and misunderstanding. Thus he finds it hard to accept her claim that she has become a ‘queen’ in heaven. The mourner had himself attributed ‘peerlessness’ and synglerty to his lost pearl (4, 8); but he had been speaking of her irreplaceability in a personal relationship and is surprised to find that God had found her singular enough to raise her to what he takes to be the singular honour of the status of ‘queen’ of heaven – especially since that was, by convention, the title of the Virgin Mary, whose claims to synglerty (429), based as they were on giving birth to God and being simultaneously virgin and mother, seemed to rest so completely secure from challenge. But his mortal terms of reference turn out to be inappropriate to heaven, where personal relationships and synglerty have no place: his daughter is now part of a corporate body (457–68), and shares in a common sovereign status (447–8).
The dreamer’s failure to understand the logic of heaven, here and at other points, is designed, not to expose his ‘errors’ (as is sometimes assumed), but to create of heaven a realm that really does prove inaccessible to human reason. In earthly terms, the title of king or queen, and the distinction it implies, become meaningless if the title is common to all. It also makes no sense in the same earthly terms that the girl should have gained the reward of queenship after only two years of service in the world, for that would mean that length of distinguished service cannot be recognized by any correlative distinction of status – which is plainly unfair.
To ‘solve’ this particular problem, the daughter retells the Parable of the Vineyard (Matthew 20) in sections IX and X. But the moral of this story (in which those who labour for less time both get paid the same wage as those who worked longer and get paid first) is notoriously difficult, and the expression which has passed into common speech (translated at 554), ‘(those who) have borne the heat and burden of the day’, is normally used in such a way as to suggest an instinctive sympathy for the position taken up by the complainants. The poet’s own realistically visualized version does nothing to make the story’s logic more palatable, and the overall effect of the parable in Pearl is therefore to sharpen the sense of some basic incompatibility between human and divine criteria of justice and reason.
The girl, after a long response to her father’s continued objections, introduces more briefly another parable from St Matthew’s Gospel: that of the ‘pearl of great price’ (Matthew 13:45–6), where the pearl for which the merchant sold all his goods represents salvation in heaven. The accretive complexity of the image of the pearl becomes particularly evident at this point. The girl, herself identified as a peerless and spotless pearl, cites a biblical parable in which the pearl stands for the ‘reme [realm] of hevens clere’ (735), pointing simultaneously to the particularly fine pearl she wears on her breast. The figurative and literal ‘pearls’ seem in fact to merge in spite of logical distinctions: