On Friday morning I skipped my usual translation work and shortened my song practice so I could get started earlier on the final stretch of my essay.
I weighed 87.6 kilos before breakfast.
I entered the final day of working on my last academic paper at 8:20, with fifteen and a half hours before the deadline.
I weighed 86.7 kilos before lunch. My paper was only seven pages too long at that point.
I pulled my essay together a little after 23:30 but by the time I adjusted the citations it was about 23:50. I wanted to change the name of the document but I kept getting a message that the file was open, even though it wasn’t. Finally I had to shut down Windows Explorer and re-open it for it to recognize that the document wasn’t open. It was a little after 23:55 when I handed in the paper, so I was still on time. Professor Ballot wanted me to send her a note when I handed it in to remind her that she’d granted me an extension. I think the note sending option is there before the submission window is used and I was in such a rush that I didn’t do it then. After submitting an assignment the note option is no longer there and so I just sent her an email. Here’s my essay:
Consolation by Substitution in “Pearl” Versus Love in Siân Hughes’s Pearl
Just climb on your tears and be silent / like a rose on its ladder of thorns - Leonard Cohen
In the anonymously written Medieval poem “Pearl” consolation is offered to the mourning Jeweller over the span of a dream. By contrast, in the novel Pearl by Siân Hughes, the grieving process experienced by the narrator Marianne unfolds over decades in an agonizingly sorrowful bildungsroman that takes decades for her to arrive at consolation. The Jeweller’s consolation is to find the one he mourns transformed into a holy being in Heaven. Marianne is simply consoled by realizing that she is loved by the one she lost. Of these two approaches, the longer, less dogmatic and far more organic journey of Marianne is more convincing and more satisfying than the radiant but cold consolation that is contrived within the beautifully structured masterpiece that is “Pearl”.
The magnificent architecture of the poem “Pearl” is designed to simulate a mystical experience. I will briefly outline how some of the carefully placed elements such as metaphor and homonyms serve to make up a poetic machine that elevates the Jeweller to a window tour of transcendence. But I will also point out that while the poem succeeds at revelation, it mostly fails at consolation. I will then show how such a failure of consolation is not unique to “Pearl”, as 1,000 years before it St. Paulinus of Nola wrote a poem with strikingly similar imagery that fails as a Consolatio but excels as a theological treatise. The theology of the poem “Pearl” will be contrasted with the non-institutional Paganism of the Siân Hughes novel Pearl. I will also point out the parallels between the two works, such as how rivers are used as metaphorical barriers between life and death in both stories; how the mourned mother Margaret in the novel Pearl is also in mourning; how her mourning is tied with the ancient children’s mourning game, “Green Gravel”; and how the lost loved ones in each work come to represent spiritual ideals for the mourners. Finally I will compare the consolations that each work offers and prove how the poem “Pearl”, however magnificent it is as a work of art, falls short as a cure for grief.
In the 14th Century poem “Pearl”, while grieving his dead daughter, the Jeweller falls asleep on her grave and has a dream that leads to finding not only his lost Pearl but also to witnessing manifestations of religious ideals for which the pearl gemstone serves as a metaphor. Metaphor according to Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger is the means by which mysticism manifests itself in language (Harkaway). It serves as a tool to express the connectedness of opposites such as singularity and multiplicity; and materiality and spirituality. The metaphor-wealthy language of “Pearl” uses carefully placed repetitions of words that have different meanings in other contexts. The poetic dance of the contrasting nuances of these paronomasia bring together and thereby create tensions that turn over the engine of paradox between connotations both familiar and mysterious. These in a sense cancel each other out but leave behind the same word, now charged with the Unknown. This serves to disorient readers and put them off their guard to be more open to deeper levels of meaning, such as the suggestion of the existence of a world beyond space and time.
In addition to creating this sense of the otherworldly, the “Pearl Poet” also binds these groupings of words together in a system of poetic concatenation that forms a web running through the poem, weaving all of the meanings into an overall sense of “the inter-connectedness of all things” (Harkaway).
The primary connector in “Pearl” is the word “pearl” itself, which is used as a type of stairway of metaphors leading to the infinite. The pearl is introduced as the rare gemstone that has been lost; then the lost pearl is revealed to be the narrator’s dead daughter; then in the dream pearls are first presented as the common strewn gravel foundation of a higher world; then pearls serve as the organized adornment of the speaker’s found but now heavenly daughter; then the pearl is shown to be that essence of human life and consciousness that many call the “soul”; and finally at the top of the ladder of pearl symbolism is the City of God Jerusalem, which is also a pearl decorated with pearls. This higher metaphor represented by the word “pearl” that the Jeweller retrieves from his mystical experience ultimately serves as a false consolation by way of substitution in his mourning process. It replaces his deceased Pearl with the transcendent ideal of achieving the City of God that is also represented in metaphor by the pearl gemstone, and which is ruled by Christ. But while the mystical experience of “Pearl” may serve as an alternative to mourning, it is not consolation.
In his short essay “Pearl As A Consolatio”, V.E. Watts offers the view that “the only cause of the father’s consolation is the vision of his daughter’s blessed life in heaven” but that her speech to the Jeweller consists of “theological treatise and exhortation” rather than consolatio. He points out that St. Paulinus of Nola's “Carmen” xxxi addressed to Pneumaitius and his wife Fidelis on the death of their young son Celsus presents a remarkable parallel to Pearl (Watts). Indeed, Pearl’s arguments to the Jeweller as she rebukes her father for mourning her are strikingly similar to those written by Paulinus one thousand years before, right down to the reference to the procession of virgins before the Lamb:
In verse 43 he harshly urges, “Devoted parents, please stop sinning with all these tears. You risk making devotion a moral failure. To grieve for a blessed soul out of devotion is disloyal. Vicious is love that weeps for a person who is now rejoicing with God” (Paulinas 1). This is echoed in “Pearl” when the Jeweller’s dead daughter says, “Sir, your conclusion is mislaid / To say your pearl has fled away / That is in such a casket laid / As in this gracious garden gay / To dwell in joy in endless day / Never can loss or grief come near / T’would seem, for any jeweller (256-265).
In another parallel with “Pearl”, after a long religious lesson, in verse 579 Paulinas offers the consolation, “Believe that Celsus, whom you jointly love, is enjoying the milk and honey of the living in the light of heaven… he is playing in a scented glade, weaving garlands as rewards for the martyrs’ glory. He will mingle with such as these, and accompany the Lamb who is King, a child newly joined to the bands of virgins (Paulinas 2). Compare this to “Pearl”: “A great procession from that town / Of virgins in the self same guise / As my beloved in her gown… The Lamb before did proudly pass (Pearl 1098-1100, 1110).
“Pearl” is certainly a Christian poem, while the novel Pearl makes very little reference to Christianity and touches more often on elements that would be considered Pagan in origin. Marianne’s lost mother Margaret was at least unconsciously Pagan or Wiccan and her mourning daughter connects with her through the memory of Margaret’s animistic interactions with nature such as saluting single magpies and asking a tree’s permission before cutting, her playful communications with “the little people” and her love, “for their usefulness, their colour, their history”, of ancient folk songs and fairy stories (Hughes 50, 154)(Wicca).
One of Margaret’s stories is about the fairy changeling. Fairies would kidnap new mothers to nurse fairy babies but they would also replace human babies with fairy copies or changelings and hold the originals hostage in the fairy realm (Hughes 50-51)(Changeling). This speaks to Marianne’s sense of feeling displaced by her mother’s disappearance, as does another story that Margaret told her about The Green Children, which is better known as “The Green Children of Woolpit”, which some claim was a visitation from the fairy realm or green world (Hughes 61)(John Clark). When Marianne is young, at the beginning of her mother’s disappearance, she wonders if she had been spirited away to fairy land (51).
The idea of a fairy realm where the people have green skin as depicted in stories told by Margaret in the novel Pearl, shows one of the parallels with the dream world in the poem “Pearl”. When the Jeweller first begins to wander in his dream he encounters, “tree-trunks blue as indigo / Like silver, each leaf /” and birds whose wingbeats make notes like the playing of a guitar (77-78, 90-95). There is something fairy like about the woods through which the Jeweller wanders before he reaches the stream and sees his lost child.
Margaret’s own lost child and her mourning for him is the strongest similarity she shares with the Jeweller. In both stories there is a stream separating the grieving parent from their dead child that would be dangerous to cross (Hughes 213)(Pearl 108). He cannot cross over and when he tries it causes him to wake up in the mortal world. The adult Marianne speculates that her mother Margaret must have died crossing the river to reach the son she was mourning. Based on the time of year that she disappeared and on information that has bubbled up about Margaret’s still-born child Jonathan and his time of birth, she pieces together the scenario that she thinks unfolded. Margaret was so tired and happy caring for her newborn child and her daughter that she had missed Jonathan’s birthday. “The horror of forgetting and then remembering… tore her from her happiness and sent her to the river” (Hughes 216-217). “She does not want to leave any of her children behind… but one of them is on the other side of that river” (214). She tries to wade through “the floodwater, heading for the chapel on the other side” (Hughes 212-213) This is parallel with the part of the poem “Pearl” in which the Jeweller sees his Pearl on the other side and ventures into the water to reach her. Marianne imagines that her mother sees a similar vision of her “angel child on the other bank who has grown into a ten-year-old child like Pearl, “dressed in the white clothes of the angels… He is telling her to… go back to the garden, keep safely to your side of the stream. He urges her to go back to her garden and back to the reality of life without him (Hughes 213). But she feels as the Jeweller does, “Sheer frenzy stole my mind away / Seeing her, I would fain draw near / Though o'er that water she must stay / … That none could keep me from my dear / Though with my life I needs must pay” (1154-1156, 1159-1160). The Pearl mourner has the good fortune to have been only dreaming or to have outside forces send him back. Margaret is not so lucky and drowns in her desperate attempt to cross to the son she is mourning.
Margaret’s mourning is only indirectly expressed to Marianne through the song known as “Green Gravel”. Marianne knows that the word “gravel” as it is used in the song is a corruption of the word “grave” (Hughes 15). “Green Gravel” is sung as part of a children’s game that is a dramatization of mourning. The selected leader of each “Green Gravel” game is called “The Mother” and she joins the other girls as they join hands and dance in a ring. After one cycle that ends with, “I’ll write down your name in a gold pen and ink”, the Mother calls out the name of one of the girls in the circle. “As each girl is named, she turns her back on the ring and covers her face with her hands; the game then goes on without her” (Green Gravel).
There is little doubt that as a traditional children’s song, “Green Gravel” long predates its 19th Century publication. It is likely that the “Pearl” poet would have been familiar with some form of the song, and given the abundance of puns in the poem, uses the word “gravel” not only in the sense of a covering of small stones but also as a corruption of “grave” as it is used in “Green Gravel”. And so after the Jeweller goes to sleep on Pearl’s grave and dreams that he is walking upon pearl gravel, he is also walking upon the grave of Pearl that is now transformed into a pathway to Paradise (82-83).
“I was remembering my mother singing “Green Gravel” and I knew now who she was singing it for. A burial song for a new baby, washed in new milk and wrapped in silk, his name a secret no one would ever say out loud again, written down in gold ink and buried with him in the Green Chapel where we used to go and light a candle… I had known all my life that when I met my mother again, and neither of us was recognizable, this was the song I had to sing to let her know it was me. This was the song that had to be sung in a particular way at the Green Chapel to appease the dead. At the Green Chapel… where she went into the water” and disappeared (114-115).
In Margaret’s absence she comes to represent Marianne’s spiritual ideals just as the grieved-after child in the poem “Pearl” is elevated to becoming a religious icon for the Jeweller. In each case the lost loved one communicates in a vision or dream but the two encounters are very different in character. In the poem the resurrected Pearl child is distant, formal and critical of the Jeweller. By contrast, at the end of the novel, Marianne’s experience of connection with her mother is one of closeness, warm affection and care. In both cases consolation is given, but again the solaces offered in each instance are of a much different nature. In Marianne’s case her mother comes to her as a ghost or in a dream. “I felt her climb into the bed next to me (219)… I felt her hand on my chest, lightly, as if she could draw out a bruise by levitation… Her arms went round me, and my breath came back to me in a sudden wave… She said to me, “There’s nothing the matter with you heart, Marianne. It’s not broken.” And I realized she was right….” Her embrace tells Marianne that everything is okay (220). Marianne also realizes that everything Margaret left behind was a love letter to her family. “The songs she left in my head, the fairy tales, the skipping rhymes, conversations with the dead... Everything about my life until the day she disappeared was evidence of happiness… The note said: I will be there when the baby wakes up” (218- 219). These evidences of her mother’s love are Marianne’s consolations.
The Jeweller has his first level of consolation, although it is not enough for him, before he enters his visionary dream. He speaks of his Pearl being an organic body that is part of the cycle of life. The pearl is no longer a jewel in this analogy but a seed. “Flower and fruit can ne'er be dead / Where that pearl slipped into the clay / For grass will grow from seed once shed / Or grain could not be stored away / And good will always good repay / This comely seed shall perish not / And spices will their fruit display / From that dear pearl without a spot” (29-36). He falls upon her grave distraught but is also overwhelmed by the fragrance of the flora that is a product of her grave. He already has a sense of consolation from the continuing life that reveals itself through the fragrance and yet he is still in mourning.
The Jeweller’s primary consolation begins with a very controlled encounter with his dead child, as the stream between life and death maintains a distance that his transformed Pearl shows no desire to close. They have a dialogue during which she tells him that his mortal perspective and his desire to reunite with her is arrogant and that he is crazy to think he can cross over. She informs him that she is now married to Christ and he must accept his loss. But she says he also must become purified to gain what she has won by dying as a spotless innocent (257-325).
The Jeweller’s final consolation comes to him sometime after he wakes from his dream. “I stretch, and all my hope expires / And sighing, to myself I say / Let it be as my Prince desires / It stole my senses clean away / To be thrust from that heavenly place” (1174-1178). The first thing he mourns then is the loss of Paradise. He is not mourning his daughter at this point. When he thinks of her next he thinks of the lessons she gave him. “'O pearl,' I cried, 'of Heaven's race / I hold all dear that you did say / … Happy am I in dungeon's space / That you are as the Prince desires” (1182-1183, 1187-1188). His consolation for the death of his daughter is complete at this point. His mourning her is supplanted by his desire to gain the soul-pearl that his daughter achieved. He mourns the fact that he did not follow god’s desires. But then starting in line 1201 it seems time has passed and he is now on a path of obedience: “To please the Prince and him requite / Is easy for the Christian man / For I have found him day and night / A God, a Lord, who ever can / Upon this hill me guide aright / … To make us each God's artisan / Those precious pearls my Prince desires” (1201-1204, 1211-1212).
The transformed Pearl who the Jeweller meets in his dream vision is not the same as his daughter who died. She has been replaced by an older, more eloquent and higher status version of herself. Comparing this to the consolation that Marianne receives from her mother Margaret, it feels distant, cold and unsatisfying. Marianne’s experience is one of receiving love, closeness and warmth from the mother that she lost. These are the elements from which consolation are constructed. Even the scenario described by St. Paulinas of Nola in the poem from which the “Pearl” poet borrows, showing the eight year old Celsus playing like an eight year old while eternally happy in Heaven, presents somewhat more consolation than the vision of a blissful robot maiden orbiting Jesus forever in Paradise. Even the organic and fulfilling experience of the physical communication of care from a loved one after they have died such as happens for Marianne is not likely to occur in reality. However, it can take place voluptuously in the imagination, but only after time has put distance between the mourner and their grief. As Marianne says, “All I did was stick around long enough for it to happen” (206-207).
Works Cited
Anonymous. Pearl. Translated by William Graham Stanton, Writers Tutorial
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Changeling. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 March, 2024,
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Clark, John. “Small, Vulnerable ETs”: The Green Children of Woolpit, SF-TH Inc, 2006, JSTOR
“Green Gravel”. Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music
https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/greengravel.html
Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger. “Mysticism and Materiality: Pearl and the Theology of Metaphor”
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Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, translated by Alex Dressler, Dokumen Pub,
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