A Pistel of Susan and Pearl

The grieving narrator in Pearl enters a garden of loss. In his misery the ‘joylez juelere’ clasps his hands in front of a mound covered with flowers yellow, blue and red: gillyflower, ginger, gromwell, peonies. On that mound, where he had lost his Pearl, he falls to the ground and is drugged to sleep by the scent of the flowers. The scene is illustrated in the first picture in the manuscript: the dreamer, dressed in a red gown with an elaborate blue hood, lies asleep on a yellow and green flowery mound by a stream surrounded by bushes. Descriptions of gardens are a favourite topic in medieval literature, and are often traced back to the Roman de la rose. To assess the extent of the Roman's influence on Pearl, we may compare another English garden.

The most elaborate of all garden descriptions is Joachim's orchard in A Pistel of Susan (Susannah). In alliterative thirteen-line rhyming stanzas the poem recounts the biblical story of the innocent Susannah, the young wife of the wealthy and upright Joachim, ‘a very beautiful young woman and one that feared God’ (Dan. 13.2), and the lecherous elders who spied on her and propositioned her while she was bathing in her secluded garden. In a departure from his source, Daniel 13 (in the Vulgate, excluded from the Authorised Version), the poet launches into a set-piece description of Susannah entering her garden with her two maids to enjoy the beauty of the trees and birds: