Free Pearl by Simon Armitage

Introduction
    H eartbroken and in mourning, a man describes the terrible sorrow he feels at the loss of his beautiful and irreplaceable ‘Perle’. In August, with flowers and herbs decorating the earth and perfuming the air, he visits a green garden, the scene of his bereavement. Tormented by images of death and decay, devastated by grief and overpowered by the intoxicating scent of the plants, he falls into a sudden sleep and begins to dream, embarking on an out-of-body experience that will lead to an encounter with his departed pearl, who we learn is his child, and a journey to the gates of heaven.
    Probably composed in the 1390s, only one copy of the untitled poem that has come to be called Pearl remains in existence. It was originally housed in the library of Henry Savile of Bank, in Yorkshire, then later in a collection belonging to Sir Robert Cotton, and is now held in the British Library as MS Cotton Nero A.x (each bookcase in Cotton’s library was overlooked by a bust of a famous historical figure, including several Roman Emperors). Pearl is the first poem in a manuscript that also includes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience and Cleanness (or Purity ). All four poems are in the same hand, and although the writing probably belongs to that of a scribe rather than the original author, most scholars believe they were composed by the same person, about whom we know very little. The historical context leads us to assume he was a man, and from the content of the poems we can deduce that he was well educated, well read and very well acquainted with the Bible, though not necessarily a man of the cloth. The same type of linguistic sleuthing that proves the author to be a contemporary of Chaucer also suggests he was a native of the English Midlands or the northwest, and both his language and his literary style are very different from his metropolitan counterpart. Chaucer’s strain of Middle English is closer to today’s speech, and much of his vocabulary can be grasped or guessed at, whereas the vocabulary of the Pearl - or Gawain -poet is at times completely foreign to the modern reader, and may well have been somewhat obscure or antiquated even in its day. Theories and counter-theories have developed around the identity of the Pearl -poet, some based on the subject matter of the poems, others on dialect words within them, but the truth is that the author of MS Cotton Nero A.x remains a mystery. What isn’t in dispute, however, is his brilliance as a poet, and it is a sobering lesson to any writer that the name of someone so adept in the art can simply vanish from history.
    Although less than half the length of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, in my view and in my experience, represents a greater challenge to the translator, largely because of the poem’s unique form and intricate structure. Presented in twenty sections, each section consists of five stanzas of twelve lines, except for section XV, which consists of six stanzas, bringing thetotal number of lines to an enigmatic 1212, thus mimicking not only the number of lines in each stanza but also the structure of the heavenly Jerusalem (twelve by twelve furlongs), with twelve gates for the twelve tribes of Israel, as specified in the Book of Revelation. Such number-symbolism is indicative of a recursive symmetry practised throughout the poem. The work is alliterative, often boasting three alliterating syllables per line, such as ‘To clanly clos in golde so clere’ (line 2), and although the poem doesn’t have a strict metre or rhythm, most lines are constructed around four beats or stresses (that is to say, four emphasised syllables occur within each line). The lines are particularly compact and intense; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also made up of (arguably) four-beat lines but is noticeably ‘wider’ on the page by comparison, suggesting that the author of Pearl was consciously fashioning a highly ornate and detailed piece, more lyrical than