Pearl
The West Midlands Poet
14th century
(A father struggles to recover faith and peace after losing his baby daughter.)
Diversity of structure is one of the wonders of poetry. Today’s poets often celebrate freedom from structure, which has its own beauty. The medieval mind cherished a different kind of beauty, one that is neither extinct nor obsolete today, just overlooked. It is the elegant euphony of placing what one wishes to convey into a strict, unifying framework. Rather than delivering a point casually or even haphazardly as we may do in everyday life, the medieval poet would conform ideas to a predetermined scheme of alliteration, rhyme, stress, mid-line breaks (caesurae), and a multilevel organization of lines into stanzas and groups of stanzas, interconnected by strands of repetition. Surely it is a handicap to expression—but this is part of its charm! The skill required to create a meaningful poem that has a detailed or complicated structure is so great that its demands separate the geniuses from the dabblers. Modern poetic sensibilities may balk at this comment, but in this age where much art and poetry is still very polarized into distinct “high” and “low” forms, I think these sensibilities are a little hypocritical. It seems in fashion today both to create art that only a fraction of society can understand, and at the same time to repudiate notions of hierarchy, including hierarchy of understanding, wherever they appear. Generally the medieval mind, cultivated within the feudal economic and political system and a strongly hierarchical Church, was more candid about social stratification. Medievals did not tend to preach egalitarianism except under God, which would be realized only in another world. This perspective characterized their art as well as society. The structured medieval poem’s handicap to expression is in itself, aside from its resulting euphony or atmosphere, a badge of excellence.
