The Pearl

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Title: The Pearl
Author: Sophie Jewett
Release Date: August 18, 2004 [EBook #13211]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE PEARL
A MIDDLE ENGLISH POEM
A MODERN VERSION IN THE METRE OF THE ORIGINAL
BY
SOPHIE JEWETT
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
WELLESLEY COLLEGE
1908
To KATHARINE LEE BATES

THE TRANSLATOR TO THE AUTHOR
Poet of beauty, pardon me
If touch of mine have tarnishèd
Thy
Pearl's pure luster, loved by thee;
Or dimmed thy vision of the dead

Alive in light and gaiety.
Thy life is like a shadow fled;
Thy place
we know not nor degree,
The stock that bore thee, school that bred;

Yet shall thy fame be sung and said.
Poet of wonder, pain, and peace,

Hold high thy nameless, laurelled head
Where Dante dwells with
Beatrice.
PREFACE
Among the treasures of the British Museum is a manuscript which
contains four anonymous poems, apparently of common authorship:
"The Pearl," "Cleanness," "Patience," "Sir Gawayne and the Green
Knight." From the language of the writer, it seems clear that he was a
native of some Northwestern district of England, and that he lived in
the second half of the Fourteenth Century. He is quite unknown, save
as his work reveals him, a man of aristocratic breeding, of religious and
secular education, of a deeply emotional and spiritual nature, gifted
with imagination and perception of beauty. He shows a liking for
technique that leads him to adopt elaborate devices of rhyme, while
retaining the alliteration characteristic of Northern Middle English
verse. He wrote as was the fashion of his time, allegory, homily, lament,
chivalric romance, but the distinction of his poetry is that of a finely
accentuated individuality.
The poems called "Cleanness" and "Patience," retell incidents of
biblical history for a definitely didactic purpose, but even these are
frequently lifted into the region of imaginative literature by the author's
power of graphic description. "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight" is a
priceless contribution to Arthurian story. "The Pearl," though it takes
the form of symbolic narrative, is essentially lyric and elegiac, the
lament, it would seem, of a father for a little, long-lost daughter.
The present translation of "The Pearl" was begun with no larger design
than that of turning a few passages into modern English, by way of

illustrating to a group of students engaged in reading the original, the
possibility of preserving intricate stanzaic form, and something of
alliteration, without an entire sacrifice of poetic beauty. The experiment
was persisted in because its problems are such as baffle and fascinate a
translator, and the finished version is offered not merely to students of
Middle English but to college classes in the history of English literature,
and to non-academic readers.
If "The Pearl" presented no greater obstacle to a modern reader than is
offered by Chaucer's English, a translation might be a gratuitous task,
but the Northwest-Midland dialect of the poem is, in fact, incomparably
more difficult than the diction of Chaucer, more difficult even than that
of Langland. The meaning of many passages remains obscure, and a
translator is often forced to choose what seems the least dubious among
doubtful readings.
The poem in the original passes frequently from imaginative beauty to
conversational commonplace, from deep feeling to didactic aphorism or
theological dogma, and it has been my endeavor faithfully to interpret
these variations of matter and of style, sometimes substituting modern
colloquialisms for such as are obsolete, or in other ways paraphrasing a
stubborn passage, but striving never to polish the dullest lines nor to
strengthen the weakest.
A reader who will observe the difficult rhyming scheme, a scheme that
calls for six words of one rhyme and four of another, will understand
the presence of forced lines, an intrusion that one must needs suffer in
even "The Faerie Queene." These padded lines are a serious blemish to
the poem, but the introduction of naïve and familiar expressions is one
of its charms, as when the Pearl, protesting like Piccarda in Paradise[1]
that among beatified spirits there can be no rivalry, exclaims: "The
more the merrier."[2]
The translation may, at many points, need apology, but the original
needs only explanation. Readers familiar with mediæval poetry expect
to encounter moral platitudes and theological subtlety. Dogma takes
large and vital place in the sublimest cantos of Dante's "Paradise," and
the English poet is consciously following his noblest master when he

puts a