‘dungeon of sorrow’. But his sentiments are also described in the terms of courtly love: he is feeling ‘luf-daungere’ (beautifully translated by W.A. Davenport in the best short introduction to Pearl as ‘love’s power to hurt’). The poem opens, not with the first-person placing in time which is usual in the dream vision (like ‘the summer season when soft was the sun’ when the narrator of Piers Plowman set off through the Malvern Hills to hear marvels), but with an address to the beloved which is more characteristic of the love lyric, as Davenport says. Even if the poem’s moral conclusion is to state the justice of God’s ways, its essential material is the intense personal experience of the narrating voice which we listen to as the common thread that holds the poem together.

Pearl has extraordinary points of stylistic power and imagination which have been universally praised: for example the end of the second of the poem’s twenty sections, describing the otherworldly beauty of the landscape that the dreamer finds himself in. He is on the bank of a stream across which he will see his transfigured child, and on the bottom of which are precious stones:

In the founce ther stonden stones stepe, As glente thurgh glas that glowed and glyght, As stremande sternes, quen strothe-men slepe, Staren in welkin in winter nyght. (113–16) There is a good deal that could be said – and has been said – about these lines by way of commentary: the lapidary tradition of gems as virtue, or the Marian lyric tradition of viewing the Incarnation of Christ as light shining through glass. Draycott’s version does it all beautifully:

The stream-bed itself was bright with stones that shone like sunlight through glinting glass or stars streaming deep in the winter sky while men in this wooded world lie asleep. To enthusiasts for the great longer poems of Middle English it has long been a frustration that there was no modern version that came anywhere near suggesting the quality and distinction of Pearl, to set beside the various modern Gawains, or Heaney’s Beowulf, or several Dantes. Here at last is a version, by an acclaimed contemporary poet, which supplies that need. Like the original, Draycott’s poem unfolds with compelling evenness without ever losing the shadow of

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