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

the poet appeals as the authority of guaranteed truth and which validates his own work as an individual revelation of the very same truth. The poem is an extraordinary blend of emo-

 

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tion and an intellectual analysis of that emotion; the dreamer feels intensely, and the maiden discounts his feelings as irrelevant to the real happiness he ought to be seeking. The poem can easily be summarized as a series of Christian truisms, but the poet demonstrates that those truisms conceal enormous complexities.
Pearl represents the most complex marriage of style and content in the whole body of alliterative poetry. The verse combines heavy alliteration with a complex rhyme scheme; the poem has an elaborate numerological structure; its 101 stanzas are linked throughout by concatenation, and the last line is almost the same as the first. It is, as has been remarked, like a highly wrought jewel box made for the pearl; the precision and detail of the frame contrast starkly with the numinous and unspeakable reality it contains. The whole poem suggests the complex unity of the single gem that is its main symbol. The detail and precision of the analysisas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight still allow for diverse conclusions. Critics vary in their censure of the dreamer as they do on the precise nature of Gawain's sin: but in both poems the central medieval paradox, that man is a miserable sinner who is still promised a chance at perfection, is highlighted and not resolved. Both poems present an unattainable ideal, and both contrast it with inevitable human inadequacy, temporality, and grief: "the faut and the fayntyse of the flesche crabbed." The otherworldly ideal offered can only be expressed by images and implications and rereadings of the existing worldthe reader must learn that jewels on earth are "really" fading roses, but that heaven can to some extent be apprehended in terms of actual roses and pearls, earthly light and human love. Paradoxically it is the jeweler's all-too-human love for his lost Pearl that enables him to ''see" the New Jerusalem and understand an unimaginable bliss. Pearl implicitly asserts a much more profound view of poetry than any medieval theorist dared to present.
Many other writers in the alliterative style show the same authorial confidence in their skills and the same pride in their technical virtuosity. The poets write with a notable lack of apology, but often with a forthright acceptance of the didactic function of poetry. The other two poems in MS Cotton Nero A x both address themselves to moral virtues, and open with straightforward assertions: "Patience is a poynt, thagh hit displese oft," and "Clannesse, whoso kyndly cowthe comende / . . . Fayre formes myght he fynde in forthering his speche." Both poems go on to explore the meanings of the virtues of patience and cleanness (or purity) by focusing on their opposites: Patience defines its virtue by describing

 

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the impatience of Jonah, and Cleanness builds up a complex definition of a subtle virtue through a series of negative exempla. Their unabashed didacticism renders them less popular today than Pearl and Sir Gawain , but they would have satisfied medieval artistic canons the more successfully for being uncontaminated with any obvious fiction.
One of the suggestive peculiarities of alliterative poetry is that the vocabulary, and to a large extent the meter and style, are shared: that is, the same rare words, lines and half-lines turn up in different poems across the corpus of verse. The earliest critics tended to explain this by assigning several works to the same author or by proving indebtedness; more modern opinion makes use of such terminology as the alliterative school or tradition . It does suggest that in at least some parts of the country the most important thing about being a poet was to have the vocabulary and metrics to render one's subject matterwhatever it might beinto a recognizably "poetic" mold that strongly