Ironically, it is not until the narrator enters the dream context that the descriptions take on a precise and perhaps less dream-like focus. The change in setting to the “jewelled landscape” of heaven (for Spearing) “something harder, sharper, brighter, even painfully bright” seems to inaugurate a sharper perception in the dreamer’s descriptions. There is a shift from the abstract to the literal, as the “pearl” is increasingly identified with the lost daughter, and though still opaque, descriptions of her are narrowed and have a greater specificity, as one: “nearer to him than aunt or niece.” In fact, the narrator becomes increasingly concerned with precisely measuring and quantifying the contradictory “paradys erde” world around him, as his language is punctuated with statements of distance and time: “the date of Þe daye Þe lorde can knaw…Bygyn at Þe laste Þhat standez lowe / Tyl to Þhe fyrst bygonne.” Even the structure of the poem itself seems to reflect a sense of this desire to limit and calculate the subject matter that it deals with, into rigid twelve line stanzas with complex, highly intricate and interlinking rhyme patterning.
However, the result exposes a conflict between the earthly and divine concepts of time and space that run throughout the poem. In some senses, the rather “wrong-headed” literalism on the part of the dreamer seems to represent a resistance to the notion that his daughter now inhabits a transcendental realm which deals with an eternal time frame, rather than a more limited sense of time rooted in an earthly context. He attempts to apply human reason to often paradoxical religious truths, such as in his confusion of the earthly Judea with heavenly Jerusalem, or the almost comic moment when he wonders where all of the 144,000 women can possibly live, suggesting that their “wonez” can perhaps be found in the “castel-walle”. However, although sometimes ridiculous, the effect is also to create a certain level of compassion with the narrator. The narrator struggles to reconcile his position of authority over his daughter that he held on earth (when she was a “faunt”), with her elevation above him (in terms of understanding and divinity) now that she is dead, as a “mayden of menske” in possession of a more complete knowledge than him: “thurghoutly haven cnawyng”. He preserves a charming (if misguided) fatherly concern for her, as he interprets her description of herself as “married to Christ” in a typically literal-minded manner, wondering how he can rightfully have so many wives. The dreamer’s concern with measuring and precise descriptions therefore reveals not only his own failure (or refusal) to comprehend the different realm that she now inhabits, but also the fundamental unmeasurability of principles such as God’s mercy or eternal life.
It seems that the dreamer embarks upon a kind of unending quest at the beginning of the poem – his desire to possess “more and more” is extended to the pearl (as a symbol in his waking life) and his daughter, but also to possess “more and more” knowledge and understanding about heaven itself. However, each step that he takes in the dream seems to bring him further from the objects of his desire. This sense of distancing and limitation is manifested in the physical symbol of the river itself that separates the dreamer from heaven. The poet plays upon the dual meaning of the word “deuyse” to illustrate the way in which the dreamer’s separation works on many different levels: “what separates the dreamer from heaven is not so much space as a different mode of being…it represents an ontological rather than spatial divide.” Even when the dreamer is allowed an insight into the heavenly city, this occurs at a distance. Putter comments upon how the descriptions: “is not intended – as it is in its biblical source – to herald man’s permanent absorption into the kingdom of God, but to underline his continued exclusion from it” (there is, for example, no mention of the second coming in Pearl). Equally, the maiden demonstrates an emotional distance from her father, speaking in a lofty tone of reprimand rather than affection: “Sir, ye haf your tale mysetente…”. It seems that the culmination of this quest to understand and bridge the spatial, emotional and symbolic gap between the two realms – as the dreamer dashes into the water – only serves to emphasise the impossibility of his aim.
For many critics, this abrupt end to the dream is often seen as rather “disappointing” (Burrow). The dreamer himself laments the way in which it is, paradoxically, his very desire for knowledge that leads him to run rashly into the water and so preclude the possibility of finding out more about Christ’s mysteries: “to that Pryncez paye hade I ay bente…To mo of his mysterys hade I ben dryven.” It is certainly the case that readers are “disappointed” in the sense that by the end “we know little more about the city of God than we could have read in the Bible” (Putter). Unlike, for example, Dante’s Divinia Commedia where the dreamer enters the transcendental realm at the end, the dreamer in Pearl never escapes his own highly literal mindset. The result is that rather than ending on a high pinnacle or climax (of a brand new imaginative vision of heaven) the poem comes full circle, back to the same biblical texts (often quoted directly from Matthew: 13) and to the permanence of his loss.
As readers, it becomes increasingly clear that “the dreamer wages a fruitless battle against our knowledge that it cannot be otherwise” (Spearing). This sense of circularity is manifested in the structure of the poem itself, within individual stanzas (bound together by the rhyme scheme), each section (linked by the refrain word) and on the level of the poem as a whole in which the first line echoes the very last one. It seems that the image of the pearl – the “endelez round” becomes a fitting metaphor of the “suggestion of starting to go round again, perhaps endlessly” (Burrow) in the theme and structure but also in the highly crafted and intricate nature of the poem, like the glittering, jewelled maiden’s crown: “highe pynakled of cler quyt perle.” The notion of a perfect “smoothe” pearl (like the symbolic “white” of the lady in Book of the Duchess) also comes to stand for the eternal ideal of absolute perfection. This is in contrast, for example, to a rose (perhaps raising associations with the Roman de la Rose in particular) that signifies more temporary human love, which will soon wither. On one level, the appearance of the “pearl” (the maiden) in the dream may be seen to illustrate a kind of temporary (Freudian) wish-fulfillment on the part of the dreamer. Indeed, in analysing dreams in his Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1951), Jung writes about a fantasy of completeness in which children serve as a “uniting symbol…one who makes whole” which “can be expressed by roundness, the circle or sphere.” However, on another level, the image of the pearl in the dream (as a symbol of round unity and completeness) confronts the narrator with the fact that his life (with her as a part of it) or his understanding, can never be complete.
For Spearing, Pearl can be distinguished from Chaucerian romances in the sense that: “in Chaucer’s dream poems there is no indication that the narrator’s dream has any subsequent effect upon his waking life…In Pearl the dreamer is changed by his dream.” This may be seen to mark a kind of “evolution in his attitudes and feelings in the course of the poem” (Borroff), a sense in which the dreamer has come to accept the need to submit his daughter to Christ and, like the merchant in the parable, sell all that he owns to possess the one thing of most value: trust in God. This apparent transformation in his attitude is signified in the shift in the description of the dreamer as “put in a mad porpose” (by the maiden) at the beginning. By the end, conversely, his focus has widened to the whole of humanity as he labels anyone who defies Christ as “mad”: Lorde, mad hit arn that agayn the stryven”. His language in the waking context of the end takes on a note of resignation, a sense that we are “subjects in a passive clause” (Putter) at the mercy of God: “bot of Þat munt I watz bitalt…”. However, while the dreamer may accept the need to ‘submit’ his daughter to the “prynces paye” on a theological level, he remains unable to restrain his emotional “longing” to possess his pearl again. At the very end, the construction of his sentences reveals both his reluctance and even casts doubt over the ‘morals’ that he has supposedly learned: “if hit be veray….”. “Patience” itself can be seen as a form of “protest” (Putter) and even his affirmations of faith may be interpreted as a statement of doubt; as Robinson writes: “”what is the point in saying “thy will be done” unless our will is in conflict?”
Moreover, the dreamer never relinquishes his paternal role. At the moment when he is confronted with the image of his daughter in a procession following Christ, the dreamer cannot resist using affectionate language of possession, in describing her as “my lyttel queene”. Even in seemingly giving up his child to Christ, he undercuts the sentiment by employing a sentence structure traditionally used by Medieval parents to address their children in letters: “in Krystes dere blessing and myn” (one of the few confirmations of the father/daughter relationship within the poem). Burrow writes: “at no time in the dream…does the father succeed in giving her up.” Instead, it seems that we are left with a statement of his intention and a sense of the dreamer struggling to come to terms with religious truths that he sees as inevitable yet painful. For Cannon, the revelation of the poem lies in the recognition of the importance of the process of doubting, “scepticism” that can be traced back to formal classical thought, but also as a mode of thinking that distinguishes us as humans (reminiscent of the Cartesian: “I think therefore I am”).
It seems that, even at the end of Pearl, neither the dreamer, nor the reader, can escape these “doubts” about the limitation of human understanding. For Putter: “the dreamer in Pearl always remains an outsider”. There is a sense of this exteriority in the symbolic river that forces the dreamer to remain outside of heaven and in the manner in which he cannot enter into a full understanding of the paradoxical transcendental truths of heaven. Even the structure of the poem itself is characterised by a kind of rigid restriction, yet as Borroff writes: “In Pearl we see the poet offering up his craft, creating an expressive power out of the very restrictions imposed upon expression”. It seems that in the complex ending of Pearl, the poet pushes boundaries of human understanding by revealing its limitations. At the beginning of the poem, the dreamer faces a personal, emotional crisis of bereavement but also poses fundamental theological and philosophical questions. At the end, when the poem has come full circle, the narrator is forced to confront the futility of his search to possess his pearl (literal and metaphorical), but also with the wider, fundamentally unanswerable nature of the questions that he seeks to answer. The unresolved, circular and opaque (even pearl-like) “problems” of the ending are in fact perhaps the most striking quality of the entire poem.
Bibliography
Borroff, Marie, Introduction to Pearl (Ontario, 1977)
Burrow, J.A., The Gawain Poet (London, 2001)
Lynch, Kathryn, The High Medieval Dream Vision (Stanford, 1988)
Putter, Ad, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (New York, 1996)
Robinson, Ian, ‘Pearl: Poetry and Suffering’ in Medieval Literature (ed. Borris Ford, London, 1982).
Spearing, A.C., Medieval Dream Poetry (Cambridge, 1976)
Series of lectures given by Dr Cannon ‘The Gawain Poet’s Doubts’ (Michaelmas term, 2003).
Notes
the dreamer is confronted with the reality permanence of his loss is faced – the pearl is still not recovered , the dreamer awakens yet still struggles to come to terms with the , the pearl
The narrator never recovers the lost “pearl” that is lost at the beginning and the poem comes full circle, the lost “pearl” at the beginning of which the poem begins with about their ability to come to terms with the most . It seems that perhaps the most complex and startling realisation made by the narrator is of the impossibility of drawing definite conclusions or “endings”
It is certainly seems that, as Putter writes, “the dreamer in Pearl always remains an outsider”. There
Sense of limitation – understanding, the structure of the poem itself
