Medieval Poem: Pear, Patience and Cleanness

Thus the pearl in the poem of that title is described as "pleasure for a prince" (1) and is made equivalent to the "cheer" (10) that the poet has lost. The narrative design of driblet is that the poet, desperate with grief at having lost his pearl of a love cardinal, falls asleep and dreams of being transported to a landscape of "splendid den and dale" (122). In due course a "child, a wetnurse of noble blood," whom the poet recognizes as his lost loved one, appears to him from across a stream of water, wearing a bloom that includes a "pearl / Of striking hue" (205-6). (Controversy surrounds the identity of the escapist's discourse partner. Ward and Trent, et al. (parag. 2), declare the pearl maiden to be the dreamer's all in(p) child, but Newhauser says that idea is "moot" (267), noting that the text is not definitive. The text itself is not helpful since it calls the pearl wearer both child and high-born maiden.)

In any case, dreamer and apparition begin an extended colloquy on the poet's loss, in which the child/maiden in divers(a) ways instructs the poet out of his self-absorbed grief and his attitude of blaming god for his loss. God's grace is "great enough" (660) a gift for anyone, the maid explains, even to one who, like the poet, claims to have an innocent soulfulness (665). Grace, indeed, becomes the meaning of the pearl: "On every breast / A pearl is strung; no strife can stand out / Among the souls who share that crest" (854-56). When the poet accepts that idea, he immediately--and

Frantzen, Allen J. "The Disclosure of Sodomy in Cleanness." PMLA 111 (May 1996): 451-464.

That she wins all the world (Cleanness 1114-23)

When He finds in a fellow fairness within,

Another judgment is that Cleanness, Patience, and Pearl are obviously all concerned with "the kinship between God's plan for salvation and the human will" (Newhauser 257).

pursuant(predicate) with the idea that a unified picture of God is vex in the three poems, Newhauser also notes that the Latin Vulgate Bible provides the backside for several passages of Pearl and "supply the essence of the narration in Patience and Cleanness" (258). The poetic artistry, according to Newhauser, arises in the poet's creation of an riming paraphrase from of the Vulgate source and "supplying psychological motivation for the put to devastation: the description of the angels' beauty provides an explanation for the Sodomites' response to the youths in Cleanness where one was lacking in the Vulgate" (29). Newhauser notes that Pearl has a more clandestine and "allusive" environment than the sermonlike texts of Patience and Cleanness. He attributes that to the poet's reliance on "English and foreign material," although he also cites the use of the divine revelation in the text as part of the basis for the dreamer/poet's presentation.

significantly--asks for more. He wants to go to "Jerusalem," which was not only the site of Jesus' death but also can mean:

The impure and undutiful He punishes, though;

Cleanness. Ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron. The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. 102-182 [even-numbered pages].

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