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By the end of the stanza her twelve lines still represent the twelveline stanza of the original. It is a rare model of how to modernise and be faithful at the same time. But of course there is something even more important than form in the definition of a great poem. Since its first commentators in the nineteenth century it has been recognised that Pearl has greatness in subject and imagination, and in an unusual way. The poem is a religious dream vision, but it is also an elegy for a dead two-year-old daughter by a father sorrowing in his ‘doel-dongeon’, his ‘prison of sorrow’. In this way it immediately invites comparison with other bereaved English poetic fathers, Ben Jonson or Wordsworth. And, though the narrative of the poem describes how the father comes gradually to an understanding of the working of God’s justice through a visionary exchange with the radiant spirit of this lost daughter, he is never reconciled and the abiding feeling is of sombre regret. In genre it is a consolatio, but it does not cancel the deeply mourning sentiments that the consolation addresses: the narrator reminds his spiritual instructress Of care and me ye made acorde, That er was grounde of alle my blysse. (371–2) In Draycott’s version: remember this: that it was you who first acquainted me with sorrow, you who’d been the source of all my bliss. It is hard to describe how the poet of Pearl achieves this double perspective of accepting faith and enduring human attachment by the end of the poem. The poet awakes at the end, but still lying on his daughter’s grave (represented as a mound of earth into which a precious pearl has slipped out of his grasp) and now thinking back to the otherworldly, paradisal vision in the course of which the transfigured child has reassured him. It is not easy, either, to give a human voice to the visionary maiden as she instructs the dreamer about the justice of God’s actions. The relationship between the two figures in the poem is a complex one, and not just because it is presented in both earthly and supernatural terms. It is the relationship between father and daughter, with an idea of parental care; but it is also a dialogue between the daughter as ‘a soul in bliss’ (the recognition scene in King Lear comes to mind) and the father in his 9
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‘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 10

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By the end of the stanza her twelve lines still represent the twelveline stanza of the original. It is a rare model of how to modernise and be faithful at the same time.

But of course there is something even more important than form in the definition of a great poem. Since its first commentators in the nineteenth century it has been recognised that Pearl has greatness in subject and imagination, and in an unusual way. The poem is a religious dream vision, but it is also an elegy for a dead two-year-old daughter by a father sorrowing in his ‘doel-dongeon’, his ‘prison of sorrow’. In this way it immediately invites comparison with other bereaved English poetic fathers, Ben Jonson or Wordsworth. And, though the narrative of the poem describes how the father comes gradually to an understanding of the working of God’s justice through a visionary exchange with the radiant spirit of this lost daughter, he is never reconciled and the abiding feeling is of sombre regret. In genre it is a consolatio, but it does not cancel the deeply mourning sentiments that the consolation addresses: the narrator reminds his spiritual instructress

Of care and me ye made acorde, That er was grounde of alle my blysse. (371–2) In Draycott’s version:

remember this: that it was you who first acquainted me with sorrow, you who’d been the source of all my bliss. It is hard to describe how the poet of Pearl achieves this double perspective of accepting faith and enduring human attachment by the end of the poem. The poet awakes at the end, but still lying on his daughter’s grave (represented as a mound of earth into which a precious pearl has slipped out of his grasp) and now thinking back to the otherworldly, paradisal vision in the course of which the transfigured child has reassured him. It is not easy, either, to give a human voice to the visionary maiden as she instructs the dreamer about the justice of God’s actions. The relationship between the two figures in the poem is a complex one, and not just because it is presented in both earthly and supernatural terms. It is the relationship between father and daughter, with an idea of parental care; but it is also a dialogue between the daughter as ‘a soul in bliss’ (the recognition scene in King Lear comes to mind) and the father in his

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