Pearls

 

     The charm of the pearl is its combination of the sensuality of an iridescent nacreous surface with the abstract Platonic perfection of a perfectly spherical form.  The minute ridges on its surface, while discernible to the eye only as a subtle shimmer, suggest the myriad phenomena of the world of experience, marvelously compacted, far smaller than a crystal ball, until it is capable of representing everything that is, like the universe just before the Big Bang or Borges’ “The Aleph.” 

     The rarity and aesthetic appeal of pearls led to their use as a figure of speech for anything of high value, and, in particular, words that are wise and beautiful.  In the King James version a passage in Job (28:18) declares wisdom to be preferable even to pearls, but scholarship has decided that this is in fact a reference to crystal.  In the Greek Testament, though, the pearl is repeatedly used, most notably perhaps in the parable of the “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:46) signifying salvation or enlightenment, while non-metaphorical pearls are condemned as a sign of vicious luxury (as in I Timothy 2:9).  In a similar bipolar opposition, Revelation employs pearls first as adornments on the Whore of Babylon (17:4 18:12) and then as part of paradise’s décor, the well-known “pearly gates” (21:21).

     The “Hymn of the Pearl,” contained within the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas describes a heroic quest for an Egyptian pearl signifying perfect wisdom that the seeker must snatch it from a threatening guardian serpent, the sort of dragon guarding treasure that appears in stories like those of Hercules, Jason, Beowulf, and Fafnir.  In Chinese lore the Fuzanglong watches over riches but particularly prizes a certain pearl as the most precious of things.  The hero of the “Hymn” succeeds in charming tfhe monster into sleep by “Chanting o’er him the Name of my Father, The Name of our Second, [my Brother], And [Name] of my Mother, the East-Queen”  (in the translation by G.R.S. Mead from The Hymn of the Robe of Glory: Echoes from the Gnosis).

     Connotations both of preciousness and of wicked arrogant wealth operate in a story told by Pliny the Elder around the same time as the “Hymn.”  In his Natural History (9.58) he says that Cleopatra wagered Antony that she could expend the fabulous sum of ten million sesterces in a single meal.   She succeeds by dissolving one of the two largest pearls in the world in vinegar and downing it, though the second is saved by Lucius Plancus, who declares Antony “defeated” (victus) in the bet, according to Pliny, an ill omen prefiguring his defeat by Octavianus.  The reader is aware, too, of Cleopatra’s suicide a short time after such sumptuous entertainments.  Pliny goes on to describe Romans who imitated Cleopatra’s grandly wasteful act.  In Caligula the gesture reached its epigone, when the emperor bedecked his horse Incitatus (the one he meant to make a consul) with pearls.  Here such ornaments are the extreme of luxury and conspicuous consumption. 

     In the lovely medieval poem called Pearl (Perle) the speaker laments his loss of a pearl, apparently identified with a deceased daughter, though the image’s associations remain fluid.  Through the polysemous subtleties of allegory, often mistaken for a reductive code, this pearl is at once a gem, a two-year-old, a grown woman, and anyone’s soul, and the perfection of paradise.  The exquisite charm of the pearl itself is detailed in one of the most well-structured and elaborately crafted poems of the late Middle Ages.  Every line of Pearl sings with rhymes, concatenations, and other more or less irregular forms of verbal music.

     This pearl, in female form but trailing associations with the highest human and spiritual values,  appears in a dream.  He plunges into the river that separates him from his “privy perle wythouten spot” only to be awakened by the “prince” of the other world, whereupon he can only praise God and accept for the present his loss with the consolation of an ultimately just divine order.  The poem’s tightly developed and subtle formulation presents the pearl as the lovely lost daughter and thus all the losses inevitable in all the ephemeral joys of the sublunary world while at the same time dialectically suggesting the eternal joys of things as they are, a perfect world order guaranteed by a loving creator. 

     A poem of disputed authorship in The Passionate Pilgrim uses very much the same comparison, calling a lady who died young a “bright orient pearl, alack, too timely shaded!” (132)  More certainly Shakespearean usage forms a semiotic pattern with considerably less focus and less assurance, though in the end the same bipolar opposition is implied.  The primary association of pearls with wealth and luxury appears a good many times, including the suggestion of the pomp and power of kingship in Henry V which mentions after crown and scepter “the intertissued robe of gold and pearl” (IV, 1, l. 271).  Pearls in Shakespeare are often a figure of human beauty as in the claim “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes.” “But pearls are fair, and the old saying is,/Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes.” (Two Gentlemen of Verona V, 2, 2062-3)

     Surely there is a sinister omen in the description of “pearly sweat, resembling dew of night” (Rape of Lucrece, 463) on Lucrece’s hands as she is admired, yet unknowing, by her attacker.  Pearls are often linked to the dead, as in Ariel’s song “Full fathom five thy father lies” in which bones are of coral and “Those are pearls that were his eyes” (Tempest I, 2, 562).  A similar vision informs Clarence’s frightening premonitory dream of “a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon” along with gold, jewels, and pearls of which “some lay in dead men's skulls”, (Richard III I, 4, ll. 26, 30)

     This ambiguity is everywhere in Shakespeare.  Cordelia’s tears are likened to pearls in Lear (IV, 3) as are Arthur’s in King John (II, 1).  In Two Gentlemen of Verona (V, 2) Proteus says that “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes,” provoking Julia to say aside “'Tis true; such pearls as put out ladies' eyes,” which ostensibly refers to her closing her eyes to avoid the sight, though the undertones are more sinister.  And, of course, to his immense and instant regret Othello “threw a pearl away/ richer than all his tribe” (V, 2).

     The symbolism of pearls can appear in unlikely places.  Joe Hill’s song “The White Slave” employs the association with female beauty to lament the downfall of “one little girl, fair as a pearl” whose poverty leads her to a miserable and unhealthy life of prostitution.  “Same little girl, no more a pearl.”  Perhaps a similar sense of vulnerable beauty led to Janis Joplin’s being called Pearl. 

     The association of pearls with excellence in verbal practice (“pearls of wisdom,” “pearls before swine”) can survive in unlikely surroundings.  When I worked as librarian in a prison, one of the most popular volumes in the collection, so attractive it had to be kept behind the counter, only to be brought out and lent by special request.  The book, Pearls of Love by Ara John Movsesian, subtitled How to Write Love Letters and Love Poems, was a collection of little lyrical bits for prisoners to include in their letters to wives and lovers. 

     A. E. Housman, whose poetry can be achingly emotional, connected pearls with art in an image he found to correspond to his own experience.

"I think that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process . . . I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal with the material so cleverly as the oyster does, is the latter; because I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting."

         A.  E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,”

     Housman is insightful enough to see beyond his view of his own case and include the possibility that for some the poetic secretion may be more “natural.”  With becoming wit and modesty, he suggests that poetry (or at least its inspiration) just comes to him uninvited, and that its coming into being is to him more a trial than a pleasure.  He nicely exploits the feeling of serendipity or even of grace that accompanies creation, while implying that the point is to eliminate an irritation in the mind just as the oyster combats a particle of sand in the intimate realm of the shell.  Perhaps the often difficult lives of artists provide evidence for the “morbidity” of the artistic sensibility.  Perhaps people who feel no contradictions produce no art.  The work of art might be conceived as the relic of a frustration, neurosis, or anxiety overcome and integrated into the self, not eliminated but mysteriously transformed.  Some will, or must, feel irresistibly the drive to make something like a pearl, round and mysterious, and beautiful, and just imperfect enough to be real.