SOURCE: "The Pearl Dreamer and the Eleventh Hour," in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, The Whitston Publishing Company, 1991, pp. 3-15.

In the following essay, Staley argues that because the poet placed the dreamer's experience in the month of harvest, the dreamer recognizes the importance of time as a catalyst for his spiritual transformation.

In this essay I would like to examine the poet's handling of time in Pearl. His awareness, not only of various ways of considering time, but of the potential artistic uses of a temporal cycle or cycles, is apparent throughout his works. In Sir Gawain, he juxtaposes Camelot with Cyclic, Degenerative, and Regenerative schemes of time, in each case to the concept of motion.¹ His use of time in that poem points up Camelot's genuine instability; the city is not capable of with-standing motion but only of tracing its own cycle...