"Pearl"

Greetings fellow Wanderers:

I am sure that none of you are in doubt that I will have an opinion about "Pearl." I have to admit that I was excited to read it after having enjoyed "Patience" so much. Unfortunately, I hate to say that I was a little disappointed in this work. I found the repetition of certain words a little unnecessary, and in some places I realized I had forgotten all about the little pearl that started this dream sequence.

However, there are some things I feel are worth pointing out. At the beginning, I became very intrigued by the line in stanza three, which reads, "For all grass must grow from grains that are dead." I liked this because it reminded me that something must die in order for something else to live. In Romans 6:11 the scripture reads, "Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord." This idea of something dying so that something may live is never so important as it is in the context of Romans 6.

As I continued on through the work, I found very little else that stood out to me until I reached the end of the poem. As I read from stanza 93-96, I was reminded of the moment in Lewis's "Perelandra" when Ransom first sees the king on page 205. His description of the moment is so beautiful that I felt it coming back to me as I was reading these passages in "Pearl." Upon seeing the king for the first time, Ransom describes it as follows:

"It was that face which no man can say he does not know. You might ask how it was possible to look upon it and not commit idolatry, not to mistake it for that of which it was the likeness. For the resemblance was, in its own fashion, infinite, so that almost you could wonder at finding no sorrows in his brow and no wounds in his hands and feet. Yet there was no danger of mistaking, not one moment of confusion, no least sally of the will towards forbidden reverence. Where likeness was greatest, mistake was least possible."

In stanza 95 of "Pearl," the writer has penned the lines "Delight the Lamb to behold with eyes/Then moved my mind with wonder more:/The best was He, blithest, most dear to prize/Of whom I e'er heard tales of yore." I connected these passages because I feel the reader can truly get a sense from both writers of what it might be like to see the face "which no man can say he does not know."