Since the time of the poem's first publication in the late 19th century, a great deal of critical discussion has taken place on the question of to which genre the poem belongs. Early editors, such as Morris, Gollancz and Osgood, took for granted that the poem was an elegy for the poet's lost daughter (presumed to have been named Margaret, i.e. 'pearl'); several scholars however, including W. H. Schofield, R. M. Garrett, and W. K. Greene were quick to point out the flaws in this assumption and sought to establish a definitive allegorical reading of the poem. There is no doubt that the poem has elements of medieval allegory and dream vision (as well as the slightly more esoteric genre of the verse lapidary), but all attempts to reduce the poem's complex symbolism to a single interpretation have fallen flat. More recent criticism has pointed to the subtle, shifting symbolism of the pearl as one of the poem's chief virtues, recognizing that there is no inherent contradiction between the poem's elegiac and its allegorical aspects, and that the sophisticated allegorical significance of the Pearl Maiden is not unusual but in fact has several quite well-known parallels in medieval literature, the most celebrated being probably Dante's Beatrice.
Besides the symbolic, on a sheer formal level, Pearl is almost astounding in its complexity, and is recognized to be, in the words of one prominent scholar, "the most highly wrought and intricately constructed poem in Middle English" (Bishop 27). It is 1212 lines long, and has 101 stanzas of 12 lines, each with the rhyme scheme ABABABABBCBC. Stanzas are grouped in sections of five (except for XV, which has six), and each section is marked by a capital letter in the manuscript; within each section, the stanzas are tied together by the repetition of a key "link"-word in the last line of each section, which is then echoed in the first line of the following section. The oft-praised "roundness" of the poem is thus emphasized, and the final link-word is repeated in the first line of the whole, forging a connection between the two ends of the poem and producing a structure that is itself circular. Alliteration is used frequently, but not consistently, throughout the poem, and there are several other sophisticated poetic devices.[10]
