The Pearl: The Fourteenth Century English Poem; Rendered in Modern Verse; With an Introductory Essay

Limited Edition. One of 1050 copies printed. Original publisher's blue paper-covered boards backed with white cloth in a black slipcase. Gilt lettering on spine of the book. 5 1/4" x 7 1/2." Slipcase measures 5 1/2" x 8." Pages [vi] vii-lxiii, [2] 3-110, complete. Pages and covers are very clean and intact. Binding is tight. Slight darkening to the book spine. Minuscule foxing on the edges of text block which barely affect the pages internally. Slipcase has some faint, small spots of dampstaining, else clean and intact. A Fine book in a Very Good slipcase. Back colophon: "Of this edition of The Pearl one thousand copies have been printed on natural wove paper and fifty copies on handmade paper by Fred Anthoensen, The Southworth Press, Portland, Maine." Reprint of The Pearl, a fourteenth-century medieval poem about an unnamed poet and his longing for a lost pearl. Foreword, Introduction, and Bibliography included. The Introduction by Chase provides thorough discussion about the meaning, authorship, and technical structure of the poem. Interpretations range from its being an allegory exemplifying Christian purity to a metaphorical account of a father's loss of a child. Also discussed in the Introduction are three other poems found in the same fourteenth-century manuscript as The Pearl, namely, Patience, Cleanness (or, Purity), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. First paragraph from the Introduction: "The present rendering of this fourteenth century poem is not intended primarily for students of that period (though I permit myself to hope that it may please some of them), but for readers of poetry in general. Therefore it will not be amiss to restate here the most pertinent facts, so far as they are known, concerning the language, the poetic form, and the authorship of the original work, the intellectual and religious influences bearing upon it, and something of its place in literary history. In its main purport, however, and without regard to subtleties of interpretation, the poem is so clear and self-sufficient that the reader who is making his first acquaintance with it may be counselled to turn directly to the translation.". …