Dream poem: Unfolding the many meanings of a meditation on grief
Among the treasures of the British Library is an unassuming manuscript identified by the shelfmark MS Cotton Nero A.x/2. Named after its early-modern collector, Sir Robert Cotton, and the Roman emperor whose bust once sat atop its shelf in Cotton’s library, the manuscript is a little smaller than seven inches long and five inches wide, the size of a very small paperback. Yet, despite its size, this manuscript looms large in the field of medieval English literature. It contains the only known copies of four alliterative poems supposed to be by the same author, written somewhere in the East Midlands in the mid- to late fourteenth century: the dream poem Pearl, which is a meditation on grief; two poems now known as Cleanness and Patience, based on biblical narratives; and the magnificent Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Though the four poems are quite different from one another, they all exhibit what one scholar has described as “a passion for pattern”. Take the concatenated clusters of stanzas in Pearl, in which a word or phrase from the final line of one stanza appears in the first line of the next. These lead eventually to the final line of the poem, which echoes its first, bringing the reader full circle and evoking formally the perfect sphere of the titular gem. Numerological features and references abound throughout the manuscript, from the obsession with the number three in Cleanness to the 101 stanzas that make up both Pearl and Sir Gawain, a total that Arthur Bahr describes as “a suggestively not-quite-perfect number that evokes the slight-but-real climactic misstep of their respective protagonists”. As his study makes clear, Bahr finds both the manuscript and its poems to be “generatively imperfect”, embodying an “aesthetics of inexactness”. This inexactness, he argues, is meant to draw the reader onward through the sequence of poems and inward via contemplation.
The author is far from the first to investigate the highly wrought nature of the Pearl manuscript. Over the years, many have claimed to identify new shapes and symmetries in both the manuscript and its texts. As Bahr remarks, “some see coincidence where others see pattern”. In his view, this is a deliberate consequence of the manuscript’s “many aesthetics of more”, the result of “a strongly ‘speculative’ sensibility, which the manuscript itself complements and enhances”. He connects this speculative sensibility to medieval conceptions of speculation…