Concatenation of God and the Immutable in 'Pearl'

Pearl by Gawain the Poet is a good example of Medieval poetry which is a style of, at least, intricate allegory. It is the overarching allegory with which this essay will be concerned. The poem is the narration of a bereaved man who fell asleep at his daughter’s gravesite and is transported to an ‘ideal world’ where his daughter had come to reside. The overarching allegory and that is embodied by the pearl and the world it presently resides is that of the Neoplatonic and Augustian distinction between an incorruptible or immutable world and its corruptible counterpart and that of God and imperfect man. This essay will approach the analysis of Pearl as a medieval poem and how within it, the medieval literary instrument of death has been used as a concatenation between the corruptible and the incorruptible.

Key Words:
Intricate allegory, pearl, medieval literary instrument, death, Neoplatonic.

Key Texts:

Augustine, St. Confessions. Ed. R.S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin Group, 1961. Print.
Poet, Gawain. The Complete Works of the Gawain Poet. Ed. J. Gardner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965. Print.
—. The Works of Gawain Poet. Ed. A.D Putter and M. Stokes. London: Penguin Classics, 2014. Print.
Saunders, C. A Companion to Medieval Poetry. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. eBook.