The New International Encyclopædia/Pearl (poem)

PEARL. A beautiful English poem belonging to the second half of the fourteenth century. It is a lament of a father for a lost child, symbolized by a pearl. The poet possessed a spotless pearl. One day as he was in an arbor it slipped from his hand down through the grass and the flowers into the earth. Wandering afterwards into the arbor in search of the lost gem, he fell asleep amid the flowers, and in vision saw his lost child by the shimmering cliffs of the new Jerusalem. The poem consists of 101 twelve-line stanzas. The dialect is West-Midland. That the poet lived in the West of England near the Welsh borders is all that is known of him. Consult Pearl, edited, with a modern English version, by Israel Gollancz (London, 1891).