Page:Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Tolkien and Gordon - 1925.djvu/31

Rh the quatrain system here and there breaks down. Pearl is an elegy on the poet’s little daughter, who died in her second year. One day he fell asleep by her grave and his ’spirit sprang in space’ to Elysian fields. By the bank of a celestial stream he met his daughter, now a queen of heaven. She told him of the heavenly bliss and showed him the vision of the heavenly city. Written in stanzas of twelve four-stress lines (which fall into quatrains within the stanzas), Pearl is swifter and more lyrical in movement than any other of the poet’s work. He is here more personal and impassioned than in the other poems, both in sorrow for the loss of his daughter and in the fire of his religious feeling. he does not always maintain complete mastery over the difficult combination of alliteration with a complicated rhyme-scheme, yet in spite of its inequality the poem is as fine of its kind as Sir Gawain

There are indications that Patience and Purity were composed before Sir Gawain. It is further noteworthy that the quatrain arrangement which runs through Patience and Purity is found also in Pearl, but not in Sir Gawain; this may be taken as indication that the other three poems were produced in sequence, and Sir Gawain last, but it is certainly nothing more than an indication.

The homiletic character of Patience and Purity, the theology of Pearl, the moral earnestness of Sir Gawain, all suggest that the author might have been a priest. Certainly he had an ecclesiastical education, but his familiarity with courtly life, and his delight in it, make it doubtful whether he was a priest. We know from Pearl that he had a daughter, but that does not settle the question, as certain of the clergy were allowed to