"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:
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."
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."
posted by Coley | 10:07 PM
2 Comments:
I already told Nicole this, but I’ll tell the rest of you as well. I found Nicole’s blog to be fascinating because she found a connection between the narrator’s first glimpse of Christ in heaven and Ransom’s first glimpse of the king in Perelandra. But the funny thing is that I also found a similar connection—not to Perelandra but to Dante’s Purgatorio, the moment when Dante first espies Beatrice. Now before I continue, I want to promise right here and now that I won’t continually compare everything we read to Dante (at least, not out loud). I know it gets old. But here I go, one more time, just for fun.
When the “Pearl” narrator first catches sight of his long-lost daughter in his vision, he exclaims, “She shone in beauty upon the shore; / Long did my glance on her alight, / And the longer I looked I knew her more. . . . So smooth, so seemly, slight and small, / That flawless fair and mirthful maid / Arose in robes majestical, /A precious gem in pearls arrayed” (14.10-12, 16.9-12).
In a similar fashion, when Dante first sees Beatrice, he is overcome by her beauty and radiance: “[A]bove / a white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs; / her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red. / Within her presence, I had once been used / to feeling—trembling—wonder, dissolution; / but that was long ago. Still, though my soul, / now she was veiled, could not see her directly, / by way of hidden force that she could move, / I felt the mighty power of old love” (Purgatorio, XXX.32-39).
There is something remarkably lovely in the way that each narrator captures his sighting of the person for whom his heart has yearned. Both Beatrice and the “Pearl” child are lovely and richly adorned. Both Dante and the “Pearl” poet are overwhelmed by what they see. The women still possess characteristics of who they were on earth, but they are much wiser now than they were before, as the “Pearl” child shows us when she rebukes her father: “For what you lost was but a rose / That by nature failed after flowering brief; / Now the casket’s virtues that it enclose / Prove it a pearl of price in chief; / And yet you have called your fate a thief / That of naught to aught hath fashioned her, / You grudge the healing of your grief, / You are no grateful jeweller” (23.5-12).
In a similar manner, Beatrice speaks strongly and with great authority when she first comes to Dante. He says, “[H]er stance still regal and disdainful, she / continued, just as one who speaks but keeps / until the end the fiercest parts of speech: / ‘Look here! I am Beatrice, I am! / How were you able to ascend the mountain? / Did you not know that man is happy here?’ / My lowered eyes caught sight of the clear stream, / but when I saw myself reflected there, / such shame weighed upon my brow, my eyes drew back / and toward the grass; just as a mother seems / harsh to her child, so did she seem to me— / how bitter is the savor of stern pity” (Purgatorio, XXX, 70-81)!
The “Pearl”/Dante connection stood out to me throughout the poem, but I have to admit that other than that, I didn’t care for “Pearl” all that much. Forgive me Dr. Hall, but I wonder if it is the translation. I adore Tolkien, and I appreciate what he said he was trying to do with the verse (his notes were quite fascinating), but in sticking so closely to the technical rhythmic patterns, I wonder if some of the “sublime” was lost in the translation.
I have to agree with Nicole and Jana in that Pearl is not my FAVORITE of all that we have read, and in looking at another translation of Pearl, I too wondered if Tolkien's translation left out some of the sense of "sublime" in the language. However, on further examination, I found that I thought the very clear and simple language Tolkien used seem to allow the "sublime" to shine through. I was particularly taken by stanzas 61 and 62 and I (naturally) saw echos of Milton later to come in the idea of the one who must die for man but with this difference: emphasis is placed upon the habitation God opens to man and the price He the jeweler (for to me, He is the jeweler and not man) pays to purchase it. Stanza 61 speaks of how "sold he all he had to clothe him in" and it brought to my mind Jesus, stripped at the cross with his clothes being wagered over. The jeweler gave all his goods to buy the pearl, and this is consistent with God giving all He has to purchase man and man's righteousness. In some ways, the jeweler can also be likened to man, but I think the emphasis of the Pearl writer is on God as the jeweler. Also, the image of the fair Pearl definitely speaks to chivalric tradition. But most of all, I enjoyed how so many traditions, both biblical and otherwise were woven together as the image of the Pearl changes meaning and is not static.
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