Free Pearl by Simon Armitage Page B

child. However, readers should not expect the poem to develop straightforwardly into an extended metaphor or ‘conceit’. Because although the young woman has pearl-like qualities – paleness, purity, radiance – from the moment she reveals herself to the dreamer she is very much a person, albeit a spirit version of her earthly existence, an apparition. (In fact at line 483 we discover she ‘lyfed not two yer’, so has become in death a being capable of mature thought and articulate speech.) She is the dreamer’s maiden, his girl, nearer to him than ‘aunte or nece’; so by implication his daughter, though interestingly that particular word is never actually used. What follows is a dialogue, conducted between bereft father and deceased child across an unfordablestretch of water, in which the girl eventually explains how heaven is now her home and that she stands beside Christ Himself, as one of his brides. At first overjoyed, then incredulous, and at times sceptical that his pearl should have risen to such exalted heights, the dreamer is eventually persuaded by the force and persistence of the girl’s argument and by the evidence of his own eyes. Towards the end of the poem, the girl presents an almost hallucinatory description of the palace of heaven, outlining its opulent geological foundations, its dazzling architecture and its glorious inhabitants, and invites the dreamer to steal a glimpse of the magnificent citadel. Awestruck by such a tantalising prospect, the dreamer rushes forward to join his pearl on the other side of the water, leaping from the riverbank only to be jolted awake, and for the vision to break, and for his loved one to disappear once again. His grief has not lessened and he still swoons with longing. But through the lessons of scripture, delivered ironically from the mouth of his own lost child, he has arrived at a philosophical acceptance of his earthly predicament. Pearl is a poem of consolation, a reminder of the life that waits, especially for those who place spiritual values over cherished possessions. It begins and ends in a real garden, framing a visit to a more extraordinary paradise where the dreamer’s outlook is transformed by the depth and power of the revelation.
    So on one level the poem is a lesson in Christian doctrine, crammed from beginning to end with biblical allusions. Some are subtle and fleeting; some are reported almost verbatim, as with the repeated references to the Book of Revelation (or ‘the Apocalypse’ as it appears in the poem); others are recounted and explicated in full, such as the Parable of the Vineyard (Matthew 20: 1–16), which occupies six of the poem’s stanzas. The Parableof the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13: 45–6) might be thought of as the catalyst for the entire poem.
    But Pearl is also a tense, fascinating and at times extremely poignant duologue, especially if viewed as one between an actual father and his daughter, and the extent to which the poem is drawn from autobiographical circumstances is another matter for speculation. The dream vision as a method of religious instruction was certainly a well-established poetic convention of the period, providing a similar starting point for Langland’s Piers Plowman, for example. Equally, encounters with characters from the afterlife have always been staples of myth, and a generative literary device in a tradition that includes Dante, Virgil, Ovid and Homer. Yet the poem has the feel of the real, as if genuine grief provided the impetus for such a poetic undertaking, or as if a desire to describe and share the solace brought about through faith and spiritual reasoning had encouraged the author to broadcast his experience through the written word. The presentation of the poem in the first person – not an automatic choice for writers of the day by any means – reinforces the suggestion that the poem deals with personal history and a lived experience. Tolkien, in the introduction to his