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Conference or Workshop Item

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Title: Pearl and the medieval dream vision

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Creators: Mackley, J. S.

Example citation: Mackley, J. S. (2011) Pearl and the medieval dream vision.

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Paper presented to: Dreams in Legend and Tradition: the Sixth Legendary
Weekend of The Folklore Society, Swaffham Assembly Hall, Norfolk, 03-04
September 2011.

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Version: Presented version

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http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/4069/
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PEARL AND THE MEDIEVAL DREAM VISION

JON MACKLEY

[PPT#1]What I want to do this morning is to look at

how Classical and Biblical traditions provided the
foundation for the medieval understanding of dream
visions, and how this was employed by various authors
of the Middle Ages, post particularly the fourteenth
century elegiac poem, Pearl.

The dream vision is the most accessible of poetic

forms. Anyone, whether king or pauper, can dream, and there is no limit to what one could
do in the dream state. However, in the Middle Ages, dreams were approached with mixed
feelings. There was precedent that dreams could be
divinely inspired. Saints’ lives often contained
revelatory dreams, which had authority from the
Bible: [PPT#2]Joseph and Daniel were able to
interpret dreams. Yet, the Bible cautioned against
dreams. The Book of Deuteronomy warns ‘neither let
there be found among you any one … that consulteth
soothsayers or observeth dreams and omens’.

There was a belief that the immortal soul separated from the body whilst dreaming, and
this potentially laid the soul open to problems: the devil could fill the minds of dreamers
with evil thoughts, carried by goblins, or mære –
hence “nightmare”. Conversely, no longer shackled by
the physical restrictions of the human body, the soul
can pass closer to God to receive inspiration.
[PPT#3]In the Purgatorio, Dante describes the
prophetic dream: “At which [hour] our minds wander/
More from the flesh and less taken with thoughts/
And have visions that are almost divine”. This
description of the disembodiment of the soul is drawn from Homer and Vergil: classical
writers believed that the dreamer and the ghost were both disembodied souls.
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So, based on the authority of classical writers, including Homer and Plato, it was suggested
prophetic dreams passed through the Gate of Horns, while deceptive dreams passed
through the Gates of Ivory. This is also discussed in Macrobius’s commentary on the Dream
of Scipio by Cicero. Writing at the beginning of the fifth century, Macrobius copied verbatim
the dream of Scipio Africanus, then added his analysis of this, identifying five types of
dreams.

[PPT#4]The first three dreams: oraculum, visio and

somnium, pass through the Gate of Keras, of Horns.
Of the prophetic dreams, the visio presents images
of future events, while an authority figure reveals
the future in the oraculum and the ambiguous
somnium bridges the divide between truth and
deception. Of the last two, those which pass through
the gate of elephas, of ivory, flee when the dreamer
awakes and Macrobius pays them little attention. [PPT#5]These dreams, he suggests,
derives from a psychological disturbance or from
over-eating. For example, in Chaucer’s Nun’s
Priest’s Tale, Chanticleer the cockerel dreams of his
approaching doom. His vision is a vivid description
of Reynard the fox – “wheer as I saugh a beest Was
lyk an hound … His colour was bitwixe yelow and
reed, And tipped was his tayl and bothe hise eeris;
with glowynge eyen tweye.” (I saw there a strange
beast [which] was like a dog… His colour yellow was
and somewhat red; And tipped his tail was, as were both his ears, and gleaming was each
eye.”) However, Chanticleer cannot comprehend what he sees, and therefore he assumes
that it is an allegory, while his wife tells him that he simply has indigestion.

Geoffrey Chaucer also used the device of the dream poem as a literary construction: as
well as taking his narrator (generally a wide-eyed innocent called ‘Geffrey’) to marvellous
places, he could can be carried by a giant eagle (who complains that Geffrey is too fat and
heavy to carry!); or using the device of a guide who has served his purpose can simply
turn a corner and vanish, or the dreamer can awake to avoid making a startling revelation
to an audience.
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Using the dream as a literary topos either places the audience in a position where they
must interpret what has been presented to them, or it absolves the dreamer from
responsibility for the events he describes: The Vision of Piers Plowman presents a
parliament of rats and mice who discuss how they can ‘ensure their common safety by
preventing the cruelties inflicted upon them by a cat. This could be seen as an allegorical
denunciation of the parliamentary system (the author, William Langland, might reply “well,
you may see it that way. I just wrote a charming fable about rats and mice”). The
allegorical parliament ends with a clever mouse observing it is better to have an unpopular
ruler (Richard II) than having nothing to maintain law and slip into mouse anarchy! In
addition, the dream of Piers Plowman was one of the few means that Langland could
discuss Biblical matters in the vernacular rather than Latin, without the Church accusing
him of heresy.

[PPT#6]During this time the medieval dream

book – the oneirocriticon – developed. The
general medieval view was that the interpretation
of each dream must vary according to the social
status of the person who experienced the dream.
Neither the psychoanalytical view of the dream as
wish fulfilment, nor that the dream personifies a
fear that the mind cannot rationalise, were
relevant to them. Instead the dream was a means
of prediction, an escape from physical or temporal constraints and a potential access to the
divine realm. The dream state is a meeting place between Heaven and Earth, it is a place
where man might receive a glimpse of the universe through God’s eyes, and where one
might see eternity laid out before him. However, the medieval dream commentators
struggled with the problem of the balance between free-will and predetermination. In The
Dream of Scipio, Scipio’s grandfather (acting as oraculum, the prophetic authority figure)
tells him that his life wavers between two destinies, suggesting that, even within a dream,
nothing is pre‐ordained.

Understandably, the medieval church denounced all dream books and the general
interpretation of dreams because it was easier to discredit them outright rather than to
enter a long theological argument about what was and what was not acceptable. The
somniatorum conjectores – the dream interpreter – was accused of perpetrating the most
pernicious of evils and there are examples of manuscripts where the dream texts have
been crossed out. In short, medieval dream books were viewed with distrust as such books
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made the dream experience something that one could interpret, rather than being a
mystical and divine experience.

There was also the issue that the dream vision was a literary construction. This could
partially be used to the writer’s advantage, after all, if he has no control over what he
dreams, then he has no choice to describe events that may be pleasing to one audience and
abhorrent to others. Arguably, there can never be a ‘true depiction’ of a dream, as there is
always a slippage from the dream to the written word (although in her Prophetic dreams,
[ppt#7]the anchorite Julian of Norwich was so ill
that she was read the last rites shortly before she
received her visions, but she accepted them as direct
knowledge of God’s truth). There are a number of
occasions when slippage might occur: the ‘finite’
mind or vocabulary is incapable of describing the
‘infinite’ that he sees in his dream (as discussed
earlier, in the case of Chanticleer the cockerel
dreaming of Reynard the fox). Similarly, there is slippage from the dream with the
necessity of changing the descriptions of events in order to create a dramatic effect, or to
conform to the rhyme or metre of the poem, thus the form prescribes the content. Finally,
a dream dissipates upon waking and a minute detail or an iconographic representation of
vital significance for the dream may be overlooked.

Against such hostility from the Church, it is surprising that one of the most beautiful poems
in Middle English which discusses important theological issues, is presented as a secular
elegy in the form of a dream vision.

[ppt#8]Pearl is a poem written in a Cheshire dialect towards the

end of the fourteenth century containing 1212 lines. It is a first
person account of a man’s grief at his loss of a ‘precious pearl’. It
begins, apparently, by describing a jeweller who has lost his pearl
in a garden, although as the Latin for Pearl is Marguerite –
Margery – it is also seen as a father lamenting the death of his
daughter who died before she was two years old – Ƿou lyfed not
two ᵹer in oure þede (You lived not two years in our land) and her
father’s inability to come to terms with his grief.
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[ppt#9]The dreamer describes how, falling asleep

in the garden, his spirit ascends, as has already been
seen in relation to Dante: ‘Fro spot my spyryt þer
sprang in space;/ My body on balke þer bōd in
sweuen’ – ‘sweuen’ here means both ‘to sleep’ and
‘to dream’.

In this dream he is transported to an otherworldly

garden, the terrestrial paradise (so, from a
structuralist point of view the terrestrial is set in opposition to the divine). In this place he
encounters a beautiful stream that he cannot cross and he becomes convinced that
paradise is on the other shore (another common motif in medieval literature, which derives
from Celtic sources: the traveller is separated from paradise by a water barrier).

[ppt#10]The terrestrial paradise is described in vivid colours and

precious gems, with birds singing sweetly, the trees in full fruit and
the rich scent of spice plants. These features echo the description of
the otherworldly Land Beyond the Waves in the Voyage of Brendan
which was hugely popular in the Middle Ages. Although Brendan’s
voyage is a physical (and spiritual) pilgrimage to the otherworld,
both Brendan and the dreamer in Pearl reach a water barrier in the
otherworld which they cannot cross – in Pearl it is a stream shining
with emeralds and sapphires. Everything beyond the barrier lies
beyond the mortal’s ability to process.

[ppt#11]As he looks for a crossing, he sees a

maiden whom he identifies as his ‘pearl’ and she
welcomes him. The Pearl-maiden is described as ‘a
child, a courteous maiden, most gracious in a mantel
of shining white’. Paradoxically, she is older than
when she died– but she has wisdom far beyond her
years. And yet, there is a tantalising touch when the
dreamer first sees her that he reveals something of
the nature of the dreamstate: ‘Desire urged me to call to her, but confusion dealt my heart
a blow. I saw her in so strange a place’. Thus, as with many dreams, the dreamer cannot
correlate two images: a person in a location where she would not normally be found and it
jolts the audience for a second about how this could happen. Of course, the maiden is
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exactly where she is meant to be: it is the dreamer who is out of place: ‘Ƿurᵹ drwry deth
boz vch man dreue,/ Er ouer þis dam hym Dryᵹten deme’ – (Every man must pass through
cruel death before God allows him over this water’).

As they converse, the dreamer raises his misconceptions about Christian doctrine, while
the maiden is given the opportunity to rebut his views, offering a parable of the vineyard
and summarising the Christian doctrine of grace (at this point the maiden becomes the
oraculum, the authority figure who guides the dreamer’s learning). In psychoanalytical
terms, the pearl maiden effectively becomes the antithesis of the super ego, which is
considered to be the authoritative voice of the father internalised by the child. Here, in the
dream-state the authoritative voice of the child has been internalised by the father. Thus
Pearl continues the tradition of the debate poems – outside of the descriptions of the
otherworld, the majority of the poem is comprised of the jeweller asking questions and
offering his flawed understanding of the nature of salvation, with the maiden offering her
response. Although there are descriptions of the otherworld, there is little dramatic
marvellous imagery, which can be seen in other poems, for example in the assault on the
Barn of Truth by Antichrist and the seven deadly sins towards the end of Piers Plowman, or
Geoffrey Chaucer being swept away by an eagle in
The House of Fame. [ppt#12] The Pearl-maiden
belittles the dreamer for his selfishness for wishing
her away from Heaven: (‘Ƿe oᵹte better þyseluen
blesse,/ And loue ay God, in wele and wo, For anger
gaynez þe not a cresse’. (You ought rather to cross
yourself, and always praise God, in prosperity and
suffering, for anger does not profit you). The
cajoling is seen in other dream debate poetry as the mortal mind is incapable of absorbing
exact knowledge about such cosmic matters.

It can be argued that Pearl is a response to the highly popular dream vision, The Romance
of the Rose. Originally written in French around 1230 where the ‘enclosed garden’ (locus
amoenus) is often associated with the Garden of Eden but also a representation of female
sexuality. Conversely, the garden in which the Pearl-maiden is found has no walls and is a
symbol of her incorruptible purity.

The final scene of the poem has the dreamer requesting to go to the New Jerusalem which
lies beyond the stream; the pearl-maiden refuses, but explains that she has attained
permission for him to view it from the exterior. He is led to view a city on the hill, which is
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described in terms of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21, where the gates are made of
pearl. Likewise, the number of lines of the poem: 1212. 12x12 corresponds with the
number of the saved in the New Jerusalem: 144,000.

One of the principal points concerning Pearl is that, like in a dream, the symbolism of what
the pearl represents is constantly changing. At the beginning of the poem it is a precious
gem: ‘perle, pleasaunte to princes paye’ (l. 1), but at the same time it is a lost daughter
who develops into the handmaiden of Christ in Heaven, while at the same time
representing the celestial procession of those who will be saved on the Day of Judgement,
and thus the pearl ‘withouten spot’ is a symbol of purity; Jesus gives the parable which
cautions about casting ‘pearls before swine’ – the valuable doctrine to those who are
unable to appreciate it; conversely, Matthew describes how the ‘Kingdom of heaven is like
a merchant seeking goodly pearls’ (Matt. 13:45). As with a ‘real’ dream, each image can be
a variety of signifiers, each representing a different interpretation of the sign. So, as
Priscilla Martin argues ‘The Pearl-maiden does not have to represented either the soul of the
dead child or immortality or the kingdom of heaven. All these meanings are simultaneously
present in the figure of the immortal soul of an innocent child in heaven’ (323).

The dream ends with the dreamer becoming overwhelmed by his desire to see inside the
New Jerusalem, but jumping into the stream acts as the shock – what viewers of Inception
would refer to as a ‘kick’ - to shock him from the dream and back into reality.

Conclusion

Many of us, as children, might have ended our stories where we had cornered ourselves
into an impossible plot with ‘And I woke up and it was all a dream. Phew!’ However, when
the dreamer in Pearl awakes, he is still grieving for the loss of his daughter, but he is wiser
for his experience. Although this is just one reading of the poem, it is clear that the Pearl-
poet has used the elegiac nature of the dream vision as a means of conveying a message
of comfort and salvation, as the dreamer receives instruction in Christian doctrine. Once
the Christian doctrine of redemption has been explained to him, he ‘still asks questions but
expresses no further objections’. However, as with Piers Plowman, the significance is that
the dream debate occurs at a time when doing so in the vernacular would have been
tantamount of heresy, but as everybody dreams, and no one can truly control their dream,
the Pearl-poet is exonerated from any responsibility.