Medieval English Verse
Pearl, and other poems  (Penguin Classics, 1964; rev. 1971)

250 pp.  First reading.
Posted 24 November 2005.
 

Here is a valuable collection of anonymous Middle English poetry from the 13th and 14th centuries - that is, the centuries prior to and contemporaneous with Geoffrey Chaucer.  There is a nice variety: both short and long poems, religious and secular themes, and a broad range of poetic forms.  Purists will be offended by the fact that the language in all the poems has been edited - which in some cases I'm sure amounts nearly to a translation - into modern English.  I appreciate the complaint, because the resulting metre and rhymes are sometimes clunky, but on the other hand I have tried in the past to read non-Chaucerian Middle English, and found it tough going.
 
Some of the poems here were already familiar to me (from musical settings by Benjamin Britten), but in most cases they were new.  I was intrigued by the number of poems that used alliteration as a primary poetic device.  Apparently the tradition of alliterative English verse, in which each line of the poem dwells on a particular sound, has a very long and influential history: I knew it from Beowulf, but didn't realize that it was still in wide use 500 years later.  To my knowledge, and I would like to be corrected, this kind of poetry has not been written by major English poets since at least the time of Shakespeare.  When and why did it pass out of favour?
 
Like medieval music, medieval architecture, and medieval philosophy, some of these poems are very intricate constructions.  The medieval mind seems to have had a love of elaborate detail harnessed within a solid formal architecture.  These poems are a pleasure to read, but to my mind some of the finest poems here are also among the simplest.  This little jewel has been finely polished:

 
(Here I have quoted the original rather than the modern English version appearing in this book; it is easy enough to understand.)
 
Surprisingly, there are also a few comic poems included here - surprising, not because our ancestors had no sense of humour, but because in an age when paper was a premium and a scribe was expensive, weighty matter tended to trump the competition.  In addition to a few tossed off miniatures that the editor remarks seem to have issued from the pen of an early Ogden Nash:


- in addition to these, there are two long comic verse tales, Dame Siriz and the Weeping Bitch and The Fox and the Wolf in the Well.  Both are very funny, and thoroughly unwholesome.

The centerpiece of the collection is undoubtedly the famous poem Pearl.  This is a genuine masterpiece that, like Beowulf, has survived in only one manuscript.  (The same manuscript, called 'Cotton Nero A.x' and held at the British Museum, also preserves the only surviving copies of the Pearl poet's other works: Patience, Purity, and the wonderful Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.)  Near misses like this make me heart-sick over the poems and stories that have undoubtedly been lost. 

Pearl is a 1212 line poem that tells of a father's sorrow over the death of his young daughter and of his vision of her in heaven.  It is at once a sharp and poignant statement of grief, an eloquent theological argument, and an exhortation to hope.  Structurally, too, it is fascinating: it is both alliterative and rhyming, and is subdivided into groups of five (or so) stanzas in which each group selects a word or phrase and uses it as the first stressed syllable of the first line and as part of the final line of each stanza in that group.  If it sounds complicated, it is.  Indeed, the translator of the version included in this volume (Brian Stone) frankly admits that he was defeated in his efforts to retain all that structure in his translation; in the end he simplified the rhyme scheme.  I would like someday to sit down and compare this translation to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, who produced the first modern English translation in the 1920s.  In the meantime, this poem, the beauty of which is only augmented by its formal structure, warms the heart of all who concur with Chesterton's quip that free verse 'is no more a revolution in literary form than eating meat raw is an innovation in cookery'.
 
I've enjoyed this book very much.  As I read, however, I found that often I could hear the Middle English sounding behind the editor's emendations, and it seemed perverse to insist on a modern rendering.  Next time I will not take the easy way out.

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