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. 

Appropriation of Biblical Narrative in Patience

Patience, the fourteenth century alliterative poem by the Pearl-Poet, provides a revealing model of the appropriation of a scriptural source. Though in many ways a typical homily in form, offering a Old and New Testament text to illustrate a lesson, the poem’s interest for most moderns arises from its irregularities. For instance, the opening praises not all “patience” (or acceptance or humility which also figure in the author’s concept), but in particular patience when wronged and treated with “heþyng.” (20)

The story of Jonah in the Hebrew (and the Vulgate that forms the background to the poet’s version) is most often cited by Christians as typological, an anticipation of Christ with the three days inside the beast prefiguring the interval between the crucifixion and the resurrection. The tropological or moral implication is also clear. Job provides the more common exemplum for patience, and Jonah certainly recalls Job in his railing, but the story also recalls that of Abraham and Isaac in its teaching of submission and acceptance. Whereas the earlier patriarch was willing to obey the Lord even to killing his son, Jonah is punished for his recalcitrance. Further, the time in the beast’s belly does not altogether reform his rebellious tendency, what the text calls, in its northern Midlands dialect, likely to slow even a reader comfortable with Chaucer’s language, his “janglande” (90) or grumbling, and he must be reproved a second time. Though the Bible’s account is telegraphic in the style of spare folk narrative, the poet indulges in considerable expansion, including colloquialisms and psychological motivation both of Jonah and of God. In the hands of the medieval poet, the story is more “realistic” and its thematic point altered to celebrate the virtue of patience.

Though in many ways a typical homily in form, the poem’s interest for most moderns arises from its irregularities. For instance, the opening praises not all “patience” (or acceptance or humility which also figure in the author’s concept), but in particular patience when wronged, “bullied,” or “abused, (19) a feeling no unknown to the lower orders of feudal society. After a recitation of the Beatitudes, he proceeds name eight “blessings” or virtues which is derived from the Beatitudes rather than from Prudentius’ Psychomachia (which includes seven rather different virtues). The poet links poverty and patience, noting that he himself must exercise the latter as he is afflicted with the former. He asks if he were to be ordered to Rome by his master he would have to accept or face worse, though compliance would bring little reward. He then adds that a very similar circumstance once occurred to Jonah, and begins to tell the tale of the reluctant prophet and the great sea beast.

Putting up with penury and the thoughtless demands of one’s boss may be Christian, but these sound more like the storyteller’s seduction of his audience through building links to their common experience and then promising the respite of a rousing good story than like a typical moralizing sermon.

Earlier readers have often appreciated the poet’s vernacular language (not only not Latin, but markedly informal English such as the words describing his resistance to the divine will. (Another is “gyrchchyng” or complaining, l. 53.) The narrative is introduced by comparing the speaker’s discomfiture at being sent on an unwelcome mission by his “lege lorde” (51) to a “jape” played on Jonah long ago. (57) He then invites the reader to hear an entertaining story, noting as a “teaser” the ironic plot. (58) Apart from the rhythmic swing, conversational exchanges between Jonah and God are rendered as naturally as a modern play. For instance, God responds “Herk renk is þis riȝt so ronkly to wrath/ For any dede þat I haf don oþer demed þe ȝet” (431-2), a divine attitude that elicits more “janglande” from Jonah. When Jonah has emerged from the beast and is established in a pleasant home he says in the most natural way, “Iwysse, a worÞloker won to welde I neuer keped.” (464)

The rich liveliness of the text provides vivid detailed accounts far beyond the Biblical text in such matters as the ship’s setting out, a step-by-step guide (attending to ropes, sail, hawsers, windlass, anchor, and so on). Later as the ship founders the sailors bale, toss featherbeds over the side, and each calls on his favorite pagan deity. Once Jonah is out and has warned Nineveh, the king strips, throws himself into ashes, dons a hair-shirt and a covering “sack,” and commands that all must perform penitential actions including fasting by babies and livestock.

His harrowing period in the stench and slime of the sea monster’s digestive tract is also described in terms readers are likely to remember, but the experience does little to reform our grumpy hero. Having built himself a little home, he is given the marvelous honeysuckle, an emblem of all earthly delights, and he feels such satisfaction he sounds like a purchaser of a new McMansion, declaring, “Iwysse, a worÞloker won to welde I neuer keped” (464) and requiring God to chasten him once more, not, one suspects, for the last time even then.

In the end, Jonah’s lesson must be, of course, for the poet’s audience, and for us all.

Be no3t so gryndel, godman, bot go forth Þy wayes,
Be preue & be pacient in payne & in joye;
For he Þat is to rakel to renden his cloÞez
Mot efte sitte with more vnsounde to sewe hem togeder. (524-527)

The emphasis is not so much in pious obedience to God as practicality. Who wants to be obliged to needlessly resew one’s wardrobe? Jonah’s acceptance includes obeying also his earthly lord mentioned at the poem’s outset. Simple acceptance of what cannot be altered is prudential, not revealed, wisdom. It is best to follow Jehovah’s commands in one’s own interest, realizing that rebellion against the divine will must increase anyone’s suffering, just as flouting one’s worldly master will bring unwelcome consequences.

The poet established contact with his audience through their common poverty and suffering. His prophet would have preferred to avoid direct dealings with the divine, but, when such contact is forced upon him, he finds it best to cooperate. The poem in fact teaches patience in the sense of forbearance and acceptance of what cannot be changed. God’s overarching plan holds little interest for Jonah who wishes only to make his small part in it as comfortable as possible. The poet managed to entertain his audience with an altogether fabulous tale of magic and monsters while maintaining a fundamental realism that allowed each listener to identify with the prophet as someone little different form the common man.

(This essay uses Moorman's edition, The Works of the Gawain-Poet.)

The Pearl-Poet's Use of Link-Rhyme

     The linking word system of the verse groups of 14th century alliterative poem The Pearl is a striking example of textual accommodation to the simultaneous demands of predictability (for intelligibility and internal coherence) and novelty (a wholly familiar work would have no particularity and thus no real independent existence). Verse especially can hardly avoid taking an explicit position between these poles. The rhyme scheme within the stanzas of The Pearl indicates the clearly equivocal pattern ABABABABBCBC. The very fact that the simple pattern of alternating lines rhyming has become established after eight lines allows a variation to appear though the new C-rhyme is welded to the old structure by the re-use of the B-rhyme. The same sort of ambivalence is evident in the linking words: they act at once to pull the text together and to articulate its changes.
     A simple glance at a list of the linking words will suffice to demonstrate their primary unifying functions: spot, dub, more, precios, pyece in perles pyʒt, juel, deme, blysse, quen of cortayse, date, more, grace inoghe, ryʒte, perle, Jerusalem, lesse, mote, John, sunne ne mone, delyt, paye. The most apparent fact about this list is that virtually all the linking words are positive, even hyperbolic, and the accumulation of their associations tends to ring the poem with an appropriate nimbus corresponding in purely linguistic terms to the poet’s removal from everyday life as described in the text. This aura of glory is of course particularly strong about the Pearl herself and indeed, the word “pearl” is twice the linking word, while the semantically similar “jewel” is used once. The only negative sounding words (lesse, mote) are used only for litotes. Thus they function in context as positive markers. “More” occurs twice, as though to point to the transcendent aim of the poem.
     As a unifying device, the linking words tie groups of stanzas and individual stanzas and link the end of the poem to the beginning. They even tend to begin with the same sound (three-quarters of them begin with one of five letters — an improbable result in a random word-list).
     The divisive, particularizing aspect of the linking words, though, is also operative in every case. They generally avoid exact duplication of meaning even in the different occurrences of a single word, preferring to trace a field of semantic variation within which the term can oscillate between meanings. For example the first linking word “spot” is used in two different senses alternately through its ten repetitions. In the second group, the word “dub” is used as a noun and as a verb, while “more” in the third modifies different parts of speech.
     In the fourth group, the link formula is a phrase rather than a word and sometimes only one of its terms is repeated, sometimes all four. In the fifth group, the word “juel” refers to the man (as jeweler) in some lines and to the woman (as precious) in others. This variation in meaning is not necessitated by the conditions of composition: it would have been possible to retain much closer the original meaning for each word. I believe the poet is consciously manipulating the value of these key-words and thus reflecting on the instability of the rest of his verbal creation. The fact that this variation is part of the design of the poem is more obvious when one notices that it intensifies toward the end of each sequence. There is a greater likelihood of new “complicating” meanings appearing in the very last use of each word, the one that is in a “foreign” strophe group. (See stanzas 31 where “deme” means simply say for the first time, 36 where “bliss” is lengthened to “blissful,” 45 where “date” means simply time, etc.)
     There are a few linking words missing where one would expect them to be; this disruption is clearly possible only within a context of order. For instance, the failure to provide an expected linking word at the opening of stanza 61 announces the critical looseness that transforms “perle” into “maskel” as key-word of group XIII.
     The potential for transformation from the mundane to the priceless is indeed the poem's theme, but it is also the poem's style.