The Pearl / A Middle English Poem, A Modern Version in the Metre of the Original

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 which contains four anonymous poems, apparently of common authorship: The Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. From the language of the writer, it seems clear that he was a native of some Northwestern district of England, and that he lived in the second half of the Fourteenth Century. He is quite unknown, save as his work reveals him, a man of aristocratic breeding, of religious and secular education, of a deeply emotional and spiritual nature, gifted with imagination and perception of beauty. He shows a liking for technique that leads him to adopt elaborate devices of rhyme, while retaining the alliteration characteristic of Northern Middle English verse. He wrote as was the fashion of his time, allegory, homily, lament, chivalric romance, but the distinction of his poetry is that of a finely accentuated individuality.
The poems called Cleanness and Patience, retell incidents of biblical history for a definitely didactic purpose, but even these are frequently lifted into the region of imaginative literature by the author's power of graphic description. Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight is a priceless contribution to Arthurian story. The Pearl, though it takes the form of symbolic narrative, is essentially lyric and 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 design than that of turning a few passages into modern English, by way of illustrating to a group of students engaged in reading the original, the possibility of preserving intricate stanzaic form, and something of alliteration, without an entire sacrifice of poetic beauty. The experiment was persisted in because its problems are such as baffle and fascinate a translator, and the finished version is offered not merely to students of Middle English but to college classes in the history of English literature, and to non-academic readers.