The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript in Modern English Prose Translation: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ed. by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (review)

The Pearl Manuscript is a collection of four poems written in the mid to late fourteenth century in a dialect local to the northwest region of England. They were found bound into a single text, now known famously as British Library MS (manuscript) Cotton Nero A.x. Medieval scholar and expert on early English literature Ronald Alan Waldron of King’s College London and Malcom Andrew, Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, collaborated to produce a verse translation first published in 1978, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, which has been revised in several subsequent editions and is a standard for the study of these works. They decided it would be helpful to also create a prose version and thus have published The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript in Modern English Prose Translation. The poems include Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and are thought to have been composed by one writer generally referred to as the Pearl Poet, though there is some ambiguity in that assessment as there is no attribution given in the original text and the stylistic similarities between the poems could be the result of all four having been transcribed by a sole copyist. Andrew and Waldron support the single-authorship theory and explain their rationale for doing so in the introduction. Their reasons include references across the poems indicating a deep knowledge of the Bible and an ability to analyze its stories and contextualize them by applying their lessons to everyday life, a subtle thread of wordplay that amplifies concepts through the use of phrases with multiple meanings, and a rich sensitivity to life’s pleasures paired with a corresponding sense of humor.

The first poem in the collection is the eponymous Pearl. It recounts a dream vision experienced by the narrator, a man who has lost his small daughter to an early death. The vision affords him some comfort as he sees her again in her spiritual form unbound by the limitations imposed by earthly life, seated in a paradisal garden and clothed in pearl-bedecked finery that represents the royalty of her higher nature. One of the loveliest elements in the poem is the repetitive use of words referring to gems and jewelry, especially the ever-present pearls. The narrator is described more than once as a jeweler and Pearl herself is the embodiment of the incomparable ornament of her namesake. Her father calls her the bauble he lost in the grass, alluding to her untimely burial. The two engage in a remarkable theological debate, with Pearl chastising her father for misplaced grief and arrogance toward the Lord in resenting Him for taking her so young, when actually, from her rarefied point of view, she has more thoroughly realized the fulfillment of her potential by passing so quickly to an entirely transcendent existence. He replies that he wishes he could join her, but she tells him that doing so could only result from his death, toward which he must not hasten as it will come only at the time decreed by God. Rashly, her father rushes the stream that separates them, and wakes himself with his over-excited efforts. In the aftermath of his return, the narrator resigns his heart to striving to become himself a pearl of God’s pleasure through obedience and restraint.

The title of the second poem Cleanness is sometimes alternately translated as Purity, which more completely maintains the continuity of its situation between Patience and Pearl, since alliteration is a hallmark of the Anglo-Saxon verse which influenced the Poet’s style. By either name, it is an essay on the virtues of spiritual continence and to illustrate this position, it vividly cites various Biblical examples of people who defiled the cleanliness...