Pearl

Though there is little evidence that the unknown poet who composed Pearl in the fourteenth century was celebrated in their time, Pearl and the poet’s other alliterative Middle English works—Patience, Cleanness, and the Arthurian masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—rival the works of Chaucer and Langland for wit, erudition, and poetic skill. Pearl tells of a man mourning his lost “pearl,” swallowed by the earth before his eyes. Swooning in his grief, he dreams of a “pearl-maiden” just out of reach: his departed two-year-old daughter, now a heavenly queen. Reminding him that she is not lost, she answers his sorrowful questions with calm, occasionally chiding, theology, and though he cannot enter, she grants a glimpse of her heavenly home in New Jerusalem before he wakes. Pearl offers not only a timeless message about loss and acceptance, but also a masterwork of Western Europe’s rich dream vision tradition.