Book Description

Excerpt from Pearl, a Fourteenth-Century Poem: Rendered Into Modern English Professor Palgrave speaks of Pearl as "perhaps the most purely and ideally perfect specimen of our elder poetry which good fortune has left us"; and few who have studied it carefully will dissent from his verdict. But the language of the poem is as much more difficult than Chaucer's, as Chaucer's is than Spenser's; and even a willing student can scarcely read the original without much wearisome toil. The object of this little book is to supply the general reader with as close a version as possible in the metre of the original; and to tempt some readers, perhaps, to study the difficult Middle English. Of the poet we know nothing but that he must almost certainly have been a contemporary of Chaucer, and the author of three other remarkable poems preserved in the same unique manuscript - Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gamayne and the Green Knight. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.