- Unde Dicitur:Observations on the Poetic Distinctiones of the Pearl-Poet
What does poetry do? According to Auden,. . . poetry makes nothing happen: it survivesIn the valley of its saying where executivesWould never want to tamper; it flows southFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,A way of happening, a mouth.
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
A way of happening. What I should like to consider in this paper is the way that the Middle English Pearl happens, and what it does to the language in which it happens. As it happens, the poem is built out of "the busy griefs" that characterize our towns. In the course of its happening, though, it transcends those busy griefs by force, if you will, of its mouth, the breath of its surviving, its enunciation. For it is in the enunciation of itself that the poem surmounts the obstacles of grief, isolation, and belief that so bedevil all of us and that are so wonderfully captured in the poor figure of the bereft dreamer.
The central means by which the Pearl does, by which it is able to survive, is as I've said, in "its saying," in its way with the resources of its language. The poem enacts a paradoxical assault on language as wielded by the various lunatics of one idea whom we all become at one point or another in our lives. It does so by playing along the surface of the language, by skimming across the sound, by suggesting the depths of meaning that may be hidden there. Poetry is, after all, where more is meant than meets the ear. And the sound-sense of Pearl plays a series of games on the obsessive literalmindedness that characterizes non-poetic discourse; [End Page 115] games against which such literalmindedness often founders, throws its hands up, and retreats to the comforts of philosophy.
Not that philosophers haven't always recognized the inherent playfulness of language. According to Thomas Aquinas, "usus loquendi [usage in speech] . . . [prevailed] over the propria significatio [proper meaning]" of words.1 For Aquinas, the "proper meaning," which inheres in a word's original sense, "is either limited, confirmed, or corrected by usage" (168). William of Ockham, drawing on Boethius and Augustine, argued that "triplex est oratio, scilicet scripta, prolata, et concepta" ("language is threefold: written, spoken, and conceptual"). He went on to distinguish between the three: "A concept or mental impression signifies naturally whatever it does signify; a spoken or written term, on the other hand, does not signify anything except by free convention. . . . From this follows another difference. We can change the designation of the spoken or written terms at will, but the designation of the conceptual term is not to be changed at anybody's will [emphasis added])."2 According to Ockham, language is fluid and subject to historical, social, or personal change. The practice of exegesis and hermeneutics during the Middle Ages offers support for this formulation. For instance, in the Allegoriae in universam sacram scripturam, a thirteenth-century dictionary of biblical words attributed to Garnier of Rochefort, one word could signify a number of concepts, often concepts that are antagonistic if not contradictory. As an example: leo could signify "Christus," but it could also signify the "Antichristus" (PL 112:984); context or intention determined denotation. But, as Augustine complained in De magistro (XIII, 43), a further complication arises because of our inability to know a speaker's intentions. In Augustine's example, a man speaks of the "virtus" or "manly power" of animals when he means bodily strength. If, as Augustine says, we could read the speaker's mind ("si eius cogitationem possemus inspicere"), we would know his intention.3 Alas, we cannot.
In poetry, all sides of the language impasse—the imprecision of signifiers and of signifieds—are enacted. One of the problems with language is its inherent mutability and the danger of polysemy. In the Pearl, for instance, such a danger is indicated in the way the poet manipulates the so-called link-words. For instance, the imagistic and thematic center of the first stanza...