Pearl (Middle English: Perle) is a late 14th-century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and from the dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North-West Midlands variety of Middle English and is highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is, among other stylistic features, a complex system of stanza-linking.
A father, mourning the loss of his perle (pearl), falls asleep in a garden; in his dream, he encounters the 'Pearl-maiden'—a beautiful and heavenly woman—standing across a stream in a strange landscape. In response to his questioning and attempts to obtain her, she answers with Christian doctrine. Eventually she shows him an image of the Heavenly City, and herself as part of the retinue of Christ the Lamb. However, when the Dreamer attempts to cross the stream, he awakens suddenly from his dream and reflects on its significance.
The poem survives in a single manuscript (London, British Library MS Cotton MS Nero A X), which includes two other religious narrative poems: Patience, and Cleanness, and the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.[1] All are thought to be by the same author, dubbed the "Pearl poet" or "Gawain poet", on the evidence of stylistic and thematic similarities. The first complete publication of Pearl, Patience and Cleanness was in Early English Alliterative Poems in the West Midland Dialect of the fourteenth century, printed by the Early English Text Society in 1864.
