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14th century English poem

Pearl is a late 14th century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and from the dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North West Midlands variety of Middle English and is highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is, among other stylistic features, a complex system of stanza linking. A father, mourning the loss of his perle (pearl), falls asleep in a garden; in his dream, he encounters the 'Pearl maiden'—a beautiful and heavenly woman—standing across a stream in a strange landscape. In response to his questioning and attempts to obtain her, she answers with Christian doctrine. Eventually she shows him an image of the Heavenly City, and herself as part of the retinue of Christ the Lamb. However, when the Dreamer attempts to cross the stream, he awakens suddenly from his dream and reflects on its significance. The poem survives in a single manuscript (London, British Library MS Cotton MS Nero A X), which includes two other religious narrative poems: Patience, and Cleanness, and the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. All are thought to be by the same author, dubbed the "Pearl poet" or "Gawain poet", on the evidence of stylistic and thematic similarities. The first complete publication of Pearl, Patience and Cleanness was in Early English Alliterative Poems in the West Midland Dialect of the fourteenth century, printed by the Early English Text Society in 1864.

Though the real name of "The Pearl Poet" (or poets) is unknown, some inferences about them can be drawn from an informed reading of their works. The original manuscript is known in academic circles as Cotton Nero A. x, following a naming system used by one of its owners, Robert Cotton, a collector of medieval English texts. Before the manuscript came into Cotton's possession, it was in the library of Henry Savile of Bank in Yorkshire. Little is known about its previous ownership, and until 1824, when the manuscript was introduced to the academic community in a second edition of Thomas Warton's History edited by Richard Price, it was almost entirely unknown. Now held in the British Library, it has been dated to the late 14th century, so the poet was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales; however, it is highly unlikely that the two ever met. The three other works found in the same manuscript as Pearl (commonly known as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness or Purity) are often considered to be written by the same author. However, the manuscript containing these poems was transcribed by a copyist and not by the original poet. Although nothing explicitly suggests that all four poems are by the same poet, comparative analysis of dialect, verse form, and diction have pointed towards common authorship. What is known today about the poet is general. As J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, after reviewing the text's allusions, style, and themes, concluded in 1925:
He was a man of serious and devout mind, though not without humour; he had an interest in theology, and some knowledge of it, though an amateur knowledge perhaps, rather than a professional; he had Latin and French and was well enough read in French books, both romantic and instructive; but his home was in the West Midlands of England; so much his language shows, and his metre, and his scenery. The poet is understood to have lived in the North Shropshire/Cheshire/Staffordshire dialect region. The Pearl Poet and is thought to have written the poem St. Erkenwald, which some scholars argue bears stylistic similarities to Gawain. The most commonly suggested candidate for authorship is John Massey of Cotton, Cheshire, though he has been dated by some scholars to a time outside the Gawain poet's era. Thus, ascribing authorship to John Massey is still controversial and a number of critics are not confident to go beyond saying the Gawain poet cannot yet be confidently identified beyond the region he came from.

The poem may be divided into three parts: an introduction (or "Prologue"), a dialogue between the two main characters in which the Pearl instructs the narrator, and a description of the New Jerusalem with the narrator's awakening.

Death and transience are major themes in the poem; outside of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard which we are presented in stanzas 42–60 we see notable reference to another biblical passage Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, in which he states "Do not lay up for yourselves treasure on earth where they moth and rust destroy but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys" (Matthew 6:19–21). This lesson becomes vital to the speakers understanding of death: we see him at the opening of the text tormented by images of death and decay in relation to his daughter who we are told "lyfed not two yer". The text repeatedly highlights the faults in her father's materialistic views, as the maiden never refers to him by name but simply as "jeweller", and a distinctly poor one at that, appearing unable to realise the girl's true heavenly wealth; while her purity and innocence are displayed through several features—her white clothing, radiance, and pale complexion (all of which could also be considered as traits of a pearl). The apparition then rejoicingly informs the man that she now stands at the side of Christ as one of the 144 thousand brides of the lamb, residing in New Jerusalem as a Queen. The text's structure of 1212 lines is reflective of this heavenly city, which is said in the Book of Revelation to be twelve thousand by twelve thousand furlongs and containing twelve gates for the twelve tribes of Israel (Revelation 21:12–17). But its poetic symmetry seems to be offset with the addition of an extra stanza bringing its total to 101, several scholars have suggested it to be reflective of the Pearl's encasement while others such as literary critic Sarah Stanbury believe it "suggests new beginnings after return". Towards the close of the poem, we are given a hallucinatory description of the spiritual bliss which awaits the virtuous within this golden citadel situated on a hill of precious stones. We will begin to see a slow and gradual break down in our protagonist's urbanity as he struggles to grasp the conventions of this realm, the dreamer's perceived ownership of the maiden "my Pearl", is an attitude derived from the social norms of the period as "the woman has no life outside the home, but simply moves, plotlessly, from daughterhood to wifehood". A process which death has interrupted for the Pearl and the Jeweller, but still, he assumes a patriarchal role and wrongly surmises that he may remain in this paradise devoid of her permission. However, the reversal in social status enables the divinely proclaimed Queen to ethically educate the dreamer during her assault on his morality, yet it seems to little avail. In the final stanzas of the poem, we witness the jeweller defiantly attempt to leap the brook which separates the living from this Edenic paradise, only for him to awaken once more upon the burial mound. Pearl is the source of Thomas Eccleshare's 2013 play Perle, a solo performance staged in the Soho Theatre. The Mediaeval Baebes set a passage from Part III to music, recording "Pearl" on their 1998 album Worldes Blysse.

Richard Morris, ed. "Early English Alliterative Poems", EETS o. S. 1 (1864; revision 1869; reprint 1965). Sir Israel Gollancz, ed. and trans. "Pearl", (London 1891; revision 1897; 2nd edition with Giovanni Boccaccio's Olympia, 1921)
Charles C. Osgood, ed. "The Pearl" (Boston and London, 1906)
Sophie Jewett, trans. The Pearl. A Middle English Poem: A Modern Version in the Metre of the Original (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1908)
E. V. Gordon, ed. "Pearl" (Oxford, 1953). Sister Mary V. Hillmann, ed. and trans., "The Pearl" (New York, 1961; 2nd edition., introduction by Edward Vasta, 1967)
Charles Moorman, ed. "The Works of the 'Gawain' Poet", (Jackson, Mississippi, 1977)
A. C. Cawley and J. J. Anderson, ed., "Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (London, 1978)
William Vantuono, ed. The Pearl poems: an omnibus edition (New York: Garland Pub., 1984) (v. 1) (v. 2) Text in both Middle English and Modern English
Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron and Clifford Peterson, ed. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Berkeley: University of California Press. Fourth ed. 2002) Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, ed. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, rev. 5th edn., 2007) with a prose translation on CD ROM. .