Produced by David Starner, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreaders Team
1908
To KATHARINE LEE BATES
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.
Among the treasures of the British Museum is a manuscript whichcontains four anonymous poems, apparently of common authorship: "ThePearl," "Cleanness," "Patience," "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight."From the language of the writer, it seems clear that he was a nativeof some Northwestern district of England, and that he lived in thesecond half of the Fourteenth Century. He is quite unknown, save ashis work reveals him, a man of aristocratic breeding, of religious andsecular education, of a deeply emotional and spiritual nature, giftedwith imagination and perception of beauty. He shows a liking fortechnique that leads him to adopt elaborate devices of rhyme, whileretaining the alliteration characteristic of Northern Middle Englishverse. He wrote as was the fashion of his time, allegory, homily,lament, chivalric romance, but the distinction of his poetry is thatof a finely accentuated individuality.
The poems called "Cleanness" and "Patience," retell incidents ofbiblical history for a definitely didactic purpose, but even these arefrequently lifted into the region of imaginative literature by theauthor's power of graphic description. "Sir Gawayne and the GreenKnight" is a priceless contribution to Arthurian story. "The Pearl,"though it takes the form of symbolic narrative, is essentially lyricand 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 designthan that of turning a few passages into modern English, by way ofillustrating to a group of students engaged in reading the original,the possibility of preserving intricate stanzaic form, and somethingof alliteration, without an entire sacrifice of poetic beauty. Theexperiment was persisted in because its problems are such as baffleand fascinate a translator, and the finished version is offered notmerely to students of Middle English but to college classes in thehistory of English literature, and to non-academic readers.
If "The Pearl" presented no greater obstacle to a modern reader thanis offered by Chaucer's English, a translation might be a gratuitoustask, but the Northwest-Midland dialect of the poem is, in fact,incomparably more difficult than the diction of Chaucer, moredifficult even than that of Langland. The meaning of many passagesremains obscure, and a translator is often forced to choose what seemsthe least dubious among doubtful readings.
The poem in the origin