A reader who will observe the difficult rhyming scheme, a scheme that calls for six words of one rhyme and four of another, will understand the presence of forced lines, an intrusion that one must needs suffer in even “The Faerie Queene.”  These padded lines are a serious blemish to the poem, but the introduction of naive and familiar expressions is one of its charms, as when the Pearl, protesting like Piccarda in Paradise[1] that among beatified spirits there can be no rivalry, exclaims:  “The more the merrier."[2]

The translation may, at many points, need apology, but the original needs only explanation.  Readers familiar with mediaeval poetry expect to encounter moral platitudes and theological subtlety.  Dogma takes large and vital place in the sublimest cantos of Dante’s “Paradise,” and the English poet is consciously following his noblest master when he puts a sermon into the lips of his “little queen.”  To modern ears such exposition is at harsh discord with the simple human grief and longing of the poet, but to the mediaevalist symbolic theology was a passion.  Precisely in the moment when she begins a discourse concerning the doctrine of redemption, Beatrice turns upon Dante “eyes that might make a man happy in the fire,” and at its close he looks upon her and beholds her “grow more beautiful."[3] If even Beatrice has been considered mere personification, it is natural that the Pearl should be so regarded, but the plain reader finds in the symbolic maiden of the English poem, as in the transfigured lady of the Italian, some record of a human being whose loss was anguish, and whose presence rapture, to a poet long ago.

The lover of things mediaeval will find in this little book not only the familiar garden of Guillaume de Lorris, of Boccaccio and of Chaucer, but an unexpected and enchanting vision of great forest and rushing water, of hillside and plain, of crystal cliffs and flame-winged birds; of the Pearl among her white peers; of the Apocalyptic Jerusalem, discovered to the poet, it may be, as a goodly Gothic city, though its walls are built of precious stone, and its towers rise from neither church nor minster.

If even a few readers turn from the modern to the original version, the translation will have had fair fortune, for the author of “The Pearl” is, though unknown and unnamed, a poet second only to Chaucer in Chaucer’s generation.

It is a pleasure to record my many debts of gratitude:  to Professor Frank H. Chase of Beloit, Professor John L. Lowes of Swarthmore, and Dr. Charles G. Osgood of Princeton, for their careful reading of the translation in manuscript, with invaluable assistance and suggestion; to Professor Martha Hale Shackford, and Miss Laura A. Hibbard, for constant aid while the work was in making, and, above all, to Professor Katharine Lee Bates for a critical, line by line, comparison of this version with the original.

[Footnote 1:  Par.  III.]