5. 'Like bubbling water that flows from a spring', i.e. his wild words rise from a heart that can no longer contain its affliction.
11-12. 'You, who were once the source of all my joy, made sorrow my companion.'
15. 'From the time when you were removed from every peril'. The child died before she was two years old (l. 123).
22. 'I am but dust, and rough in manners.' The MS. has marereȝ mysse, which has been rendered 'botcher's waste'; but the poet is contrasting his own ill-mannered speech with the Pearl's courtesy.
23. 'But the mercy of Christ and of Mary and of John'. The genitive inflexion is confined to the noun immediately preceding mersy, while the two following nouns, which are logically genitives with exactly the same construction as Crystes, remain uninflected. For analogies see note to II 518.
36. and: MS. in. The sign for and is easily mistaken for ī = in. Cp. note to XVII 42.
48. Þat, 'who'.
65. þat... of, 'from whom'; the later relative form of quom occurs at l. 93.
70. Fenyx of Arraby: the symbol of peerless perfection. Cp. Chaucer, Death of Blanche the Duchess, ll. 980-3