The purpose of this research is to examine three alliterative medieval poems from the Pearl manuscript: Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas in the texts and then to discuss whether and to what extent the poet uses a unified picture of the nature of God in them and the means by which that picture is conveyed, with reference to a variety of scholarly textual and thematic analyses.
In a curious way, discussion of the poetic strategies undertaken in the Pearl manuscript has less to do with the internal features of the text itself than with the multiple interpretations and critiques that have evolved to explain the meanings of the poems involved. There is no question that, as Finch explains (1), the text typically called the Pearl was uniquely found in the "MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, now held in the British Library." The facts that "no single line of these poems has been discovered in any other manuscript" (Ward and Trent, et al.) and that the identity of the poet is unknown and has long been disputed by scholars (Finch 1-3) complicate interpretations. That is a point to which this research will return. Before getting into that, however, a look at the texts themselves is in order.
Each of the three poems takes its title from the first word of the first line of the respective texts. Each poem, too, is allegorical and symbolical, inasmuch as elaborate figures of speech are drawn around the dominant image, or theme, of each. 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 Pearl is that the poet, desperate with grief at having lost his pearl of a loved one, falls asleep and dreams of being transported to a landscape of "splendid den and dale" (122). In due course a "child, a maid of noble blood," whom the poet recognizes as his lost loved one, appear...