To understand how Langland uses allegory in his poem, it is first necessary to understand his attitude towards language as a system of representation and what he believed language could say about the nature of the truth. For Langland, as for other medieval writers, language's truth status, and its power to present a stable relationship between words and things and between speech and thought, is ultimately authorized and sanctified by the Incarnation. God created the world and man through his Word and it is through Christ, the Word made Flesh that the imperfect, fallen nature of human language can be redeemed. Redeemed speech is a consequence of the Incarnation, a result of God uniting divinity and humanity in Christ. It is a mirror through which men may know Christ, and Christian eloquence is a transparent vessel of the Holy Spirit. Thus, as Ymaginatif tells Will in the passage from Piers Plowman which heads this chapter, the authority of human writing and of the literate clergy is founded in God's words, and is performed through the example of the Holy Spirit: ‘God was the maister, / And Seint Spirit the samplarie, and seide what men sholde write’.

Implicit in this theory of representation, which is essentially Augustinian, is the notion that language is a transparent medium through which divine meaning can be read.