In the poem's milieu, the late Middle Ages, when man's mood begins to darken into pessimism and deepening melancholy about the transience of earthly life, this tension becomes more pressing, even fraught with panic. Man's ultimate goal, Paradise, appears now more fragile and inaccessible. Art and literature present man diminished, pathetic, even comic--and therefore less worthy of such an attainment. In Pearl, the antagonists of this drama of faith are man and God, so bound by love yet so irreconcilable by nature. The poet aims at a definition of their relationship, existential rather than theoretical, and displays a certain attitude toward this relationship, which weaves in and out of the poem's emotional crises like a pervasive contrapuntal theme. The poem shows man at a moment of profound loss and spiritual confusion. In the dream, where desire battles actuality, the hero gravitates toward an ideal realm, seeking to fathom the mystery of ultimate reality, to reconcile his loss with the universal scheme of things, and to find consolation. His personal desire is gradually transformed and expanded to its anagogic form as the nostalgia for Paradise. He attempts to unite himself with the divine, at least through understanding, so that he can transcend the contradictions of this life. The divine beckons him to itself and ravishes him with its perfection, only to reject him, withdrawing at his searching touch into its awesome mystery. Yet it leaves a profound claim upon his life with its promise of final "cnawing" and immortality.

-Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl: Image of the Ineffable. A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism



et quid erat quod me delectabat, nisi amare et amari? sed non tenebatur modus ab animo usque ad animum quatenus est luminosus limes amicitiae, sed exhalabantur nebulae de limosa concupiscentia carnis et scatebra pubertatis, et obnubilabant atque obfuscabant cor meum, ut non discerneretur serenitas dilectionis a caligine libidinis. utrumque in confuso aestuabat et rapiebat inbecillam aetatem per abrupta cupiditatum atque mersabat gurgite flagitiorum. invaluerat super me ira tua, et nesciebam. obsurdueram stridore catenae mortalitatis meae, poena superbiae animae meae, et ibam longius a te et sinebas, et iactabar et effundebar et diffluebam et ebulliebam per fornicationes meas, et tacebas. o tardum gaudium meum! tacebas tunc, et ego ibam porro longe a te in plura et plura sterilia semina dolorum superba deiectione et inquieta lassitudine.

-Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions




It’s a depressing thing what’s going on with the person in the song, but it’s essentially about how when things are very awful, if you are looking for some place to turn, you’re not the type of person who can really stand to say, “Well, maybe tomorrow’s better.” Because you know tomorrow’s not better. People are gonna tell you, “You don’t know that! You don’t know about tomorrow!” But sometimes, yes you do. Sometimes you know it for a fact it’s gonna be worse. Maybe if you can go to sleep and never wake up, then you can put some faith in that. If you can’t sleep, then you can see tomorrow like a fucking train coming at you. And if it gets closer and closer, you can make out the paint on its grill as it’s coming up to meet you and you can say, “No, tomorrow’s almost here and I can already tell just as it’s about to kill me. It’s the same as the one that I just tried to abandon.” And you’re not suicidal, you say, “No, I would never do that, I’m Catholic,” but at the same time, you get in one of these moods and I will wager that every person has been in one where you go, “Well you know what wouldn’t be so bad right now would be death.”

-John Darnielle introducing Isaiah 45:23 at The Fillmore in San Francisco, 11/14/09

My foolish heart leads me on, and I obey my heart.

-Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain The Knight of the Lion

Just this:

Thou seyst, men may nat kepe a castel-wal;
It may so longe assailled been over-al.

-Chaucer

Oh wife of Bath, you are a silly and terrible lady.



We wommen han, if that I shal nat lye,
In this matere a quentye fantasye;
Wayte what thing we may nat lightly have,
Ther-after wol we crye al-day and crave.
Forbede us thing, and that desyren we;
Prees on us faste, and thanne wol we flee.


--


Allas! allas! that ever love was sinne!
I folwed ay myn inclinacioun
By vertu of my constellacioun;
That made me I coude nought withdrawe
My chambre of Venus from a good felawe.
Yet have I Martes mark up-on my face,
And also in another privee place.
For, god so wis be my savacioun,
I ne loved never by no discrecioun,
But ever folwede myn appetyt,
Al were he short or long, or black or whyt:
I took no kepe, so that he lkyed me,
How pore he was, ne eek of what degree.



-Chaucer

"Because love is not born and does not grow and reach perfection in a moment, but requires time and nourishment of thought, especially where there are opposing thoughts that impede it, it was necessary before this new love could become perfect that there be much strife between the thought that nourished it and the one that opposed it, which still held the citadel of my mind on behalf of that glorious Beatrice."
-Dante's Convivio: an interesting read, but kind of infuriating!

"The man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamored of a woman but also to be enamored of the sonnet."
-C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost

"Either he was incredibly religious or completely crazy; the distinction is mostly academic."
-Michael Pettinger

"You know me; I'm just like you. It's two in the morning and we don't know nobody."
-The Sting



Also, the other day I picked up the Complete Poems of Catullus translated by Ryan Gallagher.

On Philological Scholarship

'Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets,' wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poetisum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the 'field of Northern scholarship' as 'a vast plain, filled with dry bones,' up and down which there walked 'a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead.' But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go.

-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth