The unidentified 14th-century “Pearl poet” left behind a single manuscript written in Cheshire dialect, containing Pearl, Gawain and the Green Knight and two other religious poems. The manuscript is among the most treasured salvagings of Middle English literature, a crucial part of our rich inheritance as readers of English poetry. While most readers are more likely to know Gawain, Pearl is an extraordinary work about love, grief and faith, strikingly filled with suicidal ideation.
In her Booker-longlisted debut novel, award-winning poet Siân Hughes claims Pearl as a touchstone and source. A young mother, Marianne, recounts the death of her own mother and the years of grief that followed. As an exegesis of Pearl it’s slippery, recasting all the relationship dynamics to explore a different grief. The poem tells the story of a father’s grief for a lost daughter, so Hughes’s Pearl feels like a rather brilliant refraction, because while her story focuses on a bereaved child, there is still a grieving father, Edward, now in the supporting cast, a Rashomon retelling that works to expand the landscape of loss the Pearl poet explored. And this is not the end of Hughes’s delicate redesign – as her tale unravels, it becomes clear that the lost “pearl” is another person entirely, and the grief we are concerned with in the bulk of this narrative is a kind of secondary product of an earlier loss, a tale told at one remove. Which, Pearl leads one to think, might be a way to imagine all griefs – the result of earlier losses stretching back and back to the beginning of the world.
