Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Signposts on the Trail of the Gawain-Poet
- Chapter 1 Pearl, the Jeweller’s Dream
- Chapter 2 The Difficulty of Cleanness
- Chapter 3 Patience and the Book of Jonah
- Chapter 4 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: an Alternative Romance?
- Appendix: some Biographical and Contextual Speculations
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Pearl, the Jeweller’s Dream
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Signposts on the Trail of the Gawain-Poet
- Chapter 1 Pearl, the Jeweller’s Dream
- Chapter 2 The Difficulty of Cleanness
- Chapter 3 Patience and the Book of Jonah
- Chapter 4 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: an Alternative Romance?
- Appendix: some Biographical and Contextual Speculations
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
IT may be that the author of MS Cotton Nero A.x Art.3 had it in mind to compose a series of poems based on the Beatitudes of Matt.5:3–10. Patience and Cleanness are explicitly so based and Pearl, it has been suggested, could be an examination of ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted’. If this is so, any referring of Pearl to the consolatio tradition must be conducted with the caveat that Pearl does not offer consolation to the bereaved: this most clear-sighted of poets is concerned only to make the protagonist look hard at the implications of what he believes and desires. Pearl tells of losing and finding, with no crass attempt to ‘make it all right’. If the finding implies a gain, it is an epistemological one that in no way balances the emotional loss that is the occasion for the poem.
The memory of something lost is still something. ‘I have’ indicates a sort of having even when it is just the auxiliary verb of the perfect tense, so that ‘he has lost a pearl’ means more than ‘he has not got a pearl’. A corollary of this is that what we have is not necessarily the same as what we can be said to possess, and here we begin to approach the predicament of the grieving jeweller. His present ‘having’ is compounded of loss and of the permanent change that this experience has wrought in him, now a joylez jueler. One of the arguments of this chapter is that the jeweller, aided by his dream to analyse his loss and his sorrow, begins to understand that he is not the centre of his own story and that his pain, though grievous, exists alongside the pain of others and in a strange way, alongside God's own pain and God's own glory. As a human being, the jeweller owns this mystery as his right and as the inheritance of the Fall. To that extent it is his own, but he holds it in common with all humankind. This access of knowledge has become the substance of the poem.
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- God and the Gawain-PoetTheology and Genre in <I>Pearl, Cleanness, Patience</I> and <I>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</I>, pp. 16 - 72Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015