Piers Plowman

An titanic long poem written by William Langland, Piers Plowman is ‘life by the book’ for dummies, a tangible work that could be understood by everyone back in its heyday, preaching through crassness and vibrant dream visions how to live a relatively comfortable and spiritually fulfilling life whilst being surrounded by sin. The Norton Critical Edition features the poem written in Middle English on one page and then a modern translation on the page opposite, which makes it much easier to read and appreciate, let me tell you. 

A dreamer falls asleep many times and has vibrant visions of scenes that teach him the ways of life, God, Christ, and how to live a religious life whilst being so surrounded by sin. Many a vision he sees including a heated debated between Meed and Conscience, a false marriage concocted by Fiend, Antichrist’s rampage, the Christ figure of Piers the Plowman, and a quest to find and learn from Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best. 

Of all the texts I had to read this semester for Medieval Literature, Piers Plowman was one that I actually rather enjoyed, hence my continuing to read it recreationally. With the translation available, the vibrancy of the poem and the language is really apparent and the imagery that Langland manages to create is quite striking, albeit at its most vibrant parts it’s actually quite crass and even vulgar. I think what I really liked about this was that it was sort of a poetic equivalent of a Stanley Kubrick of Peter Greenway film. Ok let me explain my thinking here: if you think about The Cook the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and A Clockwork Orange, things that are considered high art or classiness e.g. decadent cuisine and classical music, are used in conjunction with really, really, awful and vulgar characters, thus dishevelling the classiness of it and making it really crass. That’s what this poem did for me. It took the art for of poetry, which I’m not really a fan of anyway, and used it to describe the grossest things like vomiting. I just get a kick out of the flip that some artists do with that. 

As I mentioned before, this thing is epically long; sitting at a length of twenty passuses or chapters. As you can imagine, there are many different scenes and poetic devices crammed into it. Written in the first person register from the point of view of the dreamer, there’re a number of clever little techniques that work to paint the narrative pictures that enthral. We’ve got the characters of all these virtues and human characteristics personified into physical people, we’ve got allegorical metaphors, we’ve got highly descriptive language, and all manner of things in between. I have to admit, it’s a poem that really stands up after the lengthy passing of time that it’s seen and it’s always nice to see when works, particularly works of literature, do that. 

Filled with love, quests, drama, comedy, action, and spiritual enlightenment, Piers Plowman is a captivating work that I really rather enjoyed.