Poetic Patterns of Pearl Dr. Allan Mitchell

This is one of four unique fourteenth-century poems by the same anonymous poet, surviving in a single manuscript: BL MS Cotton Nero A.x. Like the other poems, the Middle English Pearl exhibits an elaborate and demanding aesthetic that matches the challenging matter. All of the poet’s works are notable for the exquisite formal complexity of the alliterative verse, employing a highly ornamental poetics and carefully formed, often interlinking stanzas.

Linked words…

Pearl is a hybrid poem. It mixes accentual-syllabic verse of someone like Chaucer and the alliterative verse of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Langland’s Piers Plowman. It is not pure accentual verse; it consists of counted syllables in equal lines. The lines consist of rhyming iambic tetrameter with alliteration as an adornment; yet the alliteration is not merely ornamental. What is the purpose of the alliteration? For one thing, it is both a visual and aural embodiment of the idea of the endless round, the symmetrical pearl, whereby words and phonemes interlink—as though interlaced on a pearl necklace.

Linked stanzas…

The same analogy is useful in understanding the other prominent feature of the poetry, occurring at the point where each stanza begins and ends and joins in a series. This is the concatenation (chaining) of word-concepts. Just as words are linked by alliteration, so stanzas and sections are chained together through the repetition in the first and last lines. This is another circular element, reflected again in the way the first and last lines of the poem as a whole echo one another.

Linked rhymes…

There are still larger linked units. Each stanza is made up of 12 lines with an elaborate rhyme scheme, again joining the ideas together in visual and aural manner that is part of the experience of reading. We see and hear the associations as they play themselves out between words and among stanzas.

101 and counting…

Each of the 20 section of the poem is designed around 5 stanzas. Multiplying 20 by 5 gives you a total of 100 stanzas for the whole poem. But in fact there are 101. That is because one section (XV) has 6 stanzas instead of the regular 5.

Is this significant?