The Theological Structure of ‘Pearl’

Like the undergraduate who read Macbeth twice in high school — ‘once for the truth and once for the beauty’ — modern scholars seem content to restrict their reading of Pearl to an isolated consideration of either its artistry and appeal to emotion or its theology and appeal to the intellect, in spite of impressive efforts of Professors Fletcher and Wellek to resolve the elegy-allegory dispute. Even the poem's most recent editors betray their partisanship: E. V. Gordon, who repeatedly refers to the narrator-dreamer as ‘the father,’ maintains that ‘Without the elegiac basis and the sense of great personal loss which pervades it, Pearl would indeed be the mere theological treatise on a special point, which some critics have called it’; and Sister Mary Vincent Hillmann, in a veiled though determined effort to defend Sister Madeleva's view that Pearl is not a mere pathetic elegy, as some critics have implied, offers a disarmingly literal interpretation—asserting, rightly I believe, that Pearl is ‘an homiletic poem teaching that the soul must not be attached to earthly treasure if it is to attain the Kingdom of God.’ We have returned to the position of Sir Robert Cotton's librarian, who, out of touch with the sensibilities of late nineteenth-century scholars, characterized the first poem in MS. Cotton Nero A. x. as ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum, in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur.’ I will attempt to show that the poet's treatment of ‘many things concerning religion and morals’ is, like Dante's Comedy (never to my knowledge categorized as either a mere theological treatise or a mere elegy for Beatrice), a carefully structured poetic account of a spiritual itinerary culminating in an ecstasy of mystical contemplation.