Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle English and the Date of Pearl

Fein, Susanna

doi:10.2307/3040975

Cited by 14 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…26 Several types of twelve-line stanza with a concluding shift in rhyme pattern in the final four lines also saw use. 27 Scholarship long ago drew an analogy between the concluding quatrain of the twelve-line stanza in Pearl, beginning with a shift in rhyme which often coordinates with a syntactic break, and the Petrarchan sonnet's sestet. 28 Sustained writing in stanzas in English was hardly unfamiliar with units of this type.…”

Section: An Accidental Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”

Sawyer

2021

The Chaucer Review

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The earliest known English poem rhyming ababcdcdefefgg appears within John Metham's 1448/9 romance Amoryus and Cleopes. However, scholarship cannot easily claim Metham's lyric as "the first English sonnet": contrary to past suggestions, available historical and manuscript evidence indicates that he did not intentionally create it as a sonnet, but rather composed in the form accidentally. This inset lyric's rhyme scheme therefore represents, possibly uniquely in English, sonnet form without the sonnet tradition. Despite this isolation, however, attentive reading shows that the lyric achieves certain effects very like those produced by later English sonnets. The common features underpinning these effects even in a text not knowingly written as a sonnet might help criticism isolate factors which constitute form's essence or quiddity.

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Section: An Accidental Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”

Sawyer

2021

The Chaucer Review

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“…For earlier dates, see Henry Lyttleton Savage (1956), C. E. Wright (1960), and W. G. Cooke (1989), all of whom place the poet's initial compositions from the 1340s to 1370s. For later dates, see John Bowers (1995), Ad Putter (1996), Susanna Greer Fein (1997, and Michael J. Bennett (1997), all of whom place Pearl and/or Sir Gawain in the late 1380s to 1390s.…”

Section: Malcolmmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition

Campbell¹

2018

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Pearl

Baden-Daintree

2017

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain

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Pearl is a late fourteenth‐century elegiac dream vision, composed in an intricate stanza form in strongly alliterated verse, drawing on a range of secular and religious sources, but particularly the Bible. It survives solely in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . Exploring the full range of figurative associations of the pearl, the poem begins as allegory, then moves into an elegy for an infant daughter, eventually leading to a vision of heaven. The narrator's dream takes him into a dazzling bejewelled landscape where he encounters his lost daughter. The child appears in the vision as an adult woman, engaging her father in lengthy theological debate regarding salvation, which culminates in a vision of the heavenly city of Jerusalem, with Christ enthroned. The dream ends when the father attempts to rejoin his daughter, and he wakes to a renewed acceptance of God's will.

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Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle English and the Date of Pearl

Cited by 14 publications

References 1 publication

Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”

Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”

The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition

Pearl

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