The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro Page A

on chivalric adventurehis hero, a knight whose untraditional function is to stand still to be struck at and to reject a lady's advances, and the central part played by embarrassing, not heroic, situationsis set off by the virtuoso command of the knightly terminology of armory, courtship, and hunt. The elaborate description of Gawain's red-and-gold emblem, the symbolic pentangle, complemented by the lady's bright green girdle Gawain puts on over it, suggests a theory of signs far subtler than Petrarch's allegorical secret messages. The poet's cunning in interlacing the ideals of chivalry with the ethics of medieval Christianity and his skill in posing a moral conundrum so subtle that no two critics agree entirely on just where Gawain went wrong and how serious his sin was would put him on a level with Chaucer, if comparisons between two such different modes were not pointless.
The Gawain poet presents his subject as one who is fully in charge of it; he requests a hearing, ''if ye wyl lysten this laye bot on littel quile," and promises a poem "with lel letteres loken" (linked with true staves) in proper alliterative style. The long lines with their four stresses linked by alliteration are divided into unequal clumps by a short rhyming "bob and wheel"; this device controls the narrative and descriptive units (thus averting the tendency of alliterative verse to run on shapelessly), and often provides a witty or surprising "cap" or turn to a stanzaas in the surprising mention of the greenness of the strange knight at the very end of the first description of him. The poet's control is asserted explicitly when he insists on the importance of his digression on the signifi-

 

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cance of the pentangle: "and quy the pentangel apendes to that prynce noble / I am intent yow to telle, thof tary hyt me schulde." The last lines are linked to the opening; the poem is presented as a finished artifact whose seeming completeness is belied by the ambiguity of its moral message.
The richness and subtlety of the alliterative style is even more fully displayed in another poem, now entitled Pearl , from the same manuscript. The speaker of the poem tells us he is a jeweler grieving for a lost pearl. He falls asleep on the flowery mound in a garden where he lost his jewel; his dream takes him into a marvelous landscape where he sees, across a stream, a beautiful maiden who is somehow the lost pearl. The main body of the poem is a dialogue between the uncomprehending dreamer and the wise maiden, who must explain the nature of heaven, the system of celestial rewards and the value of innocence. The poem analyzes brilliantly the strange blend of possessiveness and love in human grief: the dreamer never explains who his pearl is (although he hints that she is his baby daughter), but his love and longing for her are transmitted through his incredulous delight at her reappearance and his last gesture of throwing himself into the stream to rejoin her, only to awake again on the mound that is more clearly than ever a grave. The dreamer never really understands the nature of the heaven he is shown, but he is dimly comforted at the end. The poem is explicitly didactic, but the instruction is qualified by the reversal of roles: the maiden, an infant at her death, a female illiterate, is now the instructor, and the dreamer her slow pupil. Heaven is by definition beyond human comprehension, but here its paradoxes are dramatized; the last have become the first, and the dreamer is reduced to an appeal to affection alone because nothing else he hears seems to make sense to him:
quen we departed we wern at on;
God forbede we be now wrothe;
We meten so selden by stok other ston.
                                              378380)
While the images of Pearl are the earthly analogies of light, jewels, and running water, the heart of the vision is a close borrowing from the book of Revelation, to which