ABSTRACT
For many years, and with great pleasure, I have been reading Pearl in Middle English editions and Modern English translations, and I have been reading about Pearl in the scholarship and literary criticism of diverse colleagues in America, Britain, and around the world. Pearl is my favorite poem, and I have never grown tired of studying it. It seems to me to be an almost inexhaustible source of beauty, wisdom, and strength in times of loss or sorrow. It may be that I perceive the poem this way because it is an intrinsically Christian work of art, and I admire it for the way that it makes me, a woman of faith, see truth again from new angles.
