For the Love of God and Myself: Erotic Love in the Pearl Poems

Portion of Introduction: The Pearl of Poems of Cotton Nero A.x offer four very medieval poems: two homiletic poems on how to please God, a dream-vision poem in a similar vain to La Commedia, and an Arthurian poem. The poet's pursuit in understanding divinity and heroism yields very human depictions: again and again the poet designs the characters, whether personal in Pearl, famous Arthurian figures, or God and his cohorts throughout, with fallible qualities like jealousy and cowardice. That pursuit of the divine in Pearl and the homiletic poems are what make these works about living in a world with God and his laws so compelling: there is great sincerity in the attempt to reach out and define God, but what the audience finds are figures far to o human because the divine is reduced to human terms. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight then complicates the other poems by introducing other powers, the desires of common society: our world. Thus, we are left with blemished mortals and a jealous God: to earn God's love demands certain sexualities in "Cleanness" (703), and Gawain abandons all of this commitments and takes Lady Bertilak's girdle because, as per Bertilak's analysis, "bot for 3e lufed you rlyf' (2368). The characterizations seem more like the antithesis of a heroic warrior or a just and loving deity, or at least less-than-perfect than we may expect. This thesis uses the philosophies of erotic love to read the poems: reading the scenes through the lens of erotic love brings out the believably and humanity of characters, including God.....Master of Arts (MA)English Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112024/1/Lackie2015_ForLoveGodMyself.pd