The Language of the Text

In the later Middle Ages, European literature underwent a subtle yet profound transformation that may best be understood in terms of a changing, culturally predicated, epistemological paradigm. In poetry this shift is manifested in the various uses made of that medieval prosodie mainstay—the allegory. Arguably, the fourteenth century produced the finest allegorical poetry in all of Western literature. No poem, for example, matches Pearl’s metrical symmetry, to cite one example of this century’s most astonishing metrical achievements; the poem’s symmetry approaches a perfection most acutely expressed in deeply embedded numerical systems. ¹ One poem does come close, however, to matching such pyrotechnics; decades before Pearl was written, Dante composed his Divine Comedy, whose exquisite balance was in part, as was later to be true in Pearl, expressed through numerology. Allegory can be of virtually any length, of any number of lines, of any number of syllables in a line, or whatever. Allegory can take any topic as its subject matter or employ any kind or number of symbols, numerological or otherwise. Beyond these attributes, however, the allegorical form, by definition, invites us to consider a truth residing within a perfect world. Here I use the term perfect in its literal sense to mean complete or perhaps balanced. In such a world—the world of allegory—meaning and image parallel one another. Yet, not unlike the circularity that inheres in the lyric poetic form, the structure of allegory provides ample opportunity for a poet to construct other kinds of symmetry, such as can be found, for instance, in Langland’s sprawling and brooding epic, Piers Plowman. Langland’s symmetries tend toward the thematic and may therefore be less readily apparent; the same might be said about Pearl and the Comedy, yet their Romance— versus Germanic—prosodies immediately demand a reader’s attention. These three poems have much in common. Even so, if we examine one particular trait they all possess, we will be led to a critical comprehension of their disparate kinds of symmetry. This trait, which can be aptly referred to as the “poetics of authorship,” can be found throughout post millennial poetry; the phrase denotes various devices and motifs employed by poets to assert their individuality within a literary tradition. By the time of Dante it becomes far more pronounced—in fact, the Comedy is constructed around its quintessential manifestation. Dante’s interest in the very question of singular authorship explicitly reveals itself in his creation of a protagonist that bears his name and vocation as poet.