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Pearl, Inexpressibility, and Poems of Human Loss

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ann Chalmers Watts
Ann Chalmers Watts*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey
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Abstract

Inexpressibility is an ancient and still lively topos that proclaims language inadequate to reality. Whatever the definition of reality, inexpressibility proclaims “no tongue can tell,” “no words can say.” In considering Pearl‘s four inexpressibilities, its reiterated loss, and the way the poem ends, the essay alludes to historically relevant works and to other English poems of inexpressible human loss that help to distinguish the quiet, sad way Pearl ends. Whatever Pearl‘s inexpressibilities owe to historical tradition, they participate also in the larger literary and experiential domain of worded poem for unutterable grief and in the more precise domain of poems whose speakers endure the grief of losing what they most desire and of losing too their visions of comfort, fed by that desire.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 99 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 26 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1984

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