Abstract
For many years, and with great pleasure, I have been reading Pearl in
Middle English editions and Modern English translations, and I have been
reading about Pearl in the scholarship and literary criticism of diverse colleagues in America, Britain, and around the world. Pearl is my favorite
poem, and I have never grown tired of studying it. It seems to me to be an
almost inexhaustible source of beauty, wisdom, and strength in times of
loss or sorrow. It may be that I perceive the poem this way because it is an
intrinsically Christian work of art, and I admire it for the way that it makes
me, a woman of faith, see truth again from new angles.