ABSTRACT
Nearly everyone who has ever read Piers Plowman has confronted an odd formal characteristic of the poem when someone asks “What’s it about? What happens in it?” These two very ordinary questions, considered loosely equivalent by the common reader, will not at all elicit the same kind of answer. Thematic descriptions (“what it’s about”) tend to be offered as noun phrases encompassing a global statement: it is about the salvation of man’s soul, the reform of the Christian community, the problem of knowledge, the grounds for, and means of, attaining faith. Such descriptions imply that there is a perceptible order, continuity, and unity of dominant and realized artistic intentions in the poem. Such an effort is bound to be literal-minded and largely unconcerned with the allegorical significance below, or reflected in, its surface succession of temporal appearances. Literary form is in this view an aspect of a historical language mediating between the will and the work.
