Perle

On Friday, late in the evening, I found something precious.

I was reading an article trying to find something helpful for my essay and ran into a poem called Perle, or Pearl in modern English. I looked it up and found the full text, both the original one written by an unknown author in the late 14^th century and a translation to modern English by William Stanton. Perle was written in Middle English and I must admit I needed the translation to be able to follow. I read both texts stanza by stanza, first the original one, then the translation. I was happy to see that even though I struggled with the Middle English orthography and vocabulary I understood quite a lot. And oh, was that poem beautiful!

Perle tells the story of a man who has lost his pearl, presumably a young maid, in a garden and cannot find it anymore. The man grieves for the pearl and enters the green garden again in August with a heavy heart. He falls asleep in the grass and then finds himself in a heavenly wood by a radiant, glass-like stream more beautiful than he ever could have imagined. On the other side of the river there stands a maid whom the man recognizes as his long-lost pearl. He is convinced that paradise awaits him beyond the stream but cannot cross it. Instead, he engages in a dialogue with the maid who finally shows him a glimpse of the otherworldly kingdom, New Jerusalem.

The dialogue part – which is mostly focused on Christian doctrine and virtue – wasn’t that thrilling to me: the maid attempts to correct some of the narrator’s (I’m very confused, in Finnish we never ever call the voice in the poem a narrator, that’s for prose) false beliefs about sin and mercy. However, it had its moments: I loved the part when the narrator expresses his grief for losing the pearl and the maid comforts him by saying that he never truly lost it – it was just a rose that naturally had to wither:

"O perle," quoth I, "in perles pyght,
Art thou my perle that I haf playned,
Regretted by myn one on nyghte?
Much longeyng haf I for thee layned
Sythen into gresse thou me aglyghte.
Pensyf, payred, I am forpayned,
And thou in a lyf of lykyng lyghte
In Paradys erde, of stryf unstrayned.
What wyrde has hyder my juel vayned
And don me in thys del and gret daunger?
Fro we in twynne wern towen and twayned
I haf ben a joyles jueler."

– –

"Bot, jueler gente, if thou schal lose
Thy joy for a gemme that thee was lef,
Me thynk thee put in a mad porpose
And busyes thee about a raysoun bref.
For that thou lestes was bot a rose
That flowred and fayled as kynde hyt gef;
Now thurgh kynde of the kyste that hyt con close
To a perle of prys hit is put in pref.
And thou has called thy wyrde a thef
That oght of noght has mad thee cler.
Thou blames the bote of thy meschef.
Thou art no kynde jueler."

This is one of my favourite parts of the over 1000-line poem. However, I loved most the stanzas preceding the dialogue, starting from the very first line to the end of the third part. The description of the garden or woodland area – the stream especially – is wonderful. There is so much I’d like to say about this poem, I’m too confused to write anything sensible. Symbolically (and perhaps allegorically, even more) it was very fascinating. The meaning of ‘perle’ is highly complex; the word appeared in several different contexts and given all of its possible allusions it would take ages to analyze its meaning properly. I was also quite excited about the resemblance of the pearl-maiden to Dante’s Beatrice – I read the Divine Comedy a few years ago and as much I’ve forgotten about it this poem reminds me of certain things. My greatest grief at the moment is that my English isn’t sufficient to understand the complicated nature of the verse used in the Middle English text. Perhaps one day I’ll have the skills needed to fully appreciate the beauty of this poem.

What really appealed to me about this text was the thematic of the Dreamer and the conventional Middle-Age poetry dream/vision genre. Perhaps I’ll write more about that later, I can’t sum up my feelings in one text.

A square in Tampere was filled with ice sculptures on Saturday evening. All of them were pretty but I mostly took pictures of this one (also the ones above are of the same sculpture). There were all kinds of figures, animals and such but this one I could have stared at for hours. Ice is so fair in itself, its surface so clear that in my opinion it doesn't need much changing.