Piers Plowman

Provider: Cecilia Liu / 劉雪珍

Persona

• The persona is both a partly fictional character subject to impressions of the human and divine and also a vehicle conveying or embodying views, quests, questionings, which may or may not have been the poet's own, or those of some of his contemporaries. The poem is often called a spiritual autobiography; but this is a simpliste description, the ironical result of the very vividness of Langland's presentation of his dreamer. Thus at the end of the first and shortest recension (the 'A test'), as readers we feel the gulf implied between learning and salvation to be so great as to be unbridgeable; it was all too easy to suggest that the poet here cobbled up an ending, and then began again, at Passus XI in his 'B text,' when he had new light. 
• The poet records a spiritual crisis that he experienced after a disputation with friars in later years. The poem, like Dante's, is certainly in one sense a Pilgrim's Progress--but hardly in Bunyan's sense; it describes not so much a spiritual journey (and journey was the dominant sense of 'progress' in Bunyan's day) as an unfolding, a development, stage by stage, passus by passus.
• The allegory of a spiritual pilgrimage had taken impressive literary form forty years before Langland wrote, in a work that became immediately popular and remained so for three centuries. Guillaume de Deguileville had written his verse Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine in 1331 and a revised and enlarged (indeed verbose) version had appeared in 1355.  The seventy manuscripts (often illustrated) that survive testify to its popularity and accessibility, though evidently no English versions were made before the fifteenth century. There is no proof that Langland knew this subtle and elaborate work (if it influenced Bunyan it must have been at several removes, and in simplified form). But we can hardly avoid noting that it proceeds by the device of didactic dialogue that Langland was to employ, and that some of its characters--e.g. Reason, Anima-- appear in Piers Plowman, together with some of its distinctive features and images--e.g. the author who poses as a naïve narrator, or the barn which in Piers Plowman is Holy Church and in the Pelerinage stands for Christ. These, like the figurative courts or castles that appear in Passus V and IX suggest that directly or indirectly Langland was influenced by the French tradition of didactic allegory. 
• The plowman who gives his name to the poem and who appears in such diverse manifestations has no antecedent (or genuine successor). When he 'puts forth his head' to address the puzzled pilgrims in the fifth passus a new chapter opens in English literature, and rustic life takes on a new importance, a new value.  Chaucer evidently took note: he presents a ploughman who is sufficiently well-to-do and independent to go on pilgrimage with his brother, a parish priest and a learned clerk. 
• The development of the poem is not linear, but neither circuitous; it is that of a helix, or a corkscrew, in which, at certain points of rest, the Dreamer looks back at earlier scenes and views them in a new perspective; the simplifications or exaggerations of earlier views are thus tacitly or explicitly corrected. It is not altogether fanciful to regard the spiral as circling round four crucial conceptions: 
  
  1. The Field of folk: an image of the material world, which narrows down to Piers' half-acre, widens again to be Middle-earth, is reduced to the tree of Charity growing in a garden, and finally becomes wholly spiritualized, ploughed by the four evangelists and sown with seed of the Spirit.
     
  2. Holy Church: the repository of Truth--figured first as a high-towered castle(I); then as an interior castle of the soul (v); then as the Ark--the 'shingled ship' of Passus IX; finally as the barn of Unity (Passus XIX).
     
  3. The theme of Pardon: introduced obliquely with the false Pardoner of the Prologue; dramatized in Passsus VII; linked with the capital sins in the person of Haukin who questions the efficacy of his priest's pardon; identified with the Christlike Piers (xix. 388). 
     
  4. The rood of the Crucifixion, round which the whole work revolves: the symbol of Divine Love: so presented in Passus I, by Holy Church; by Repentance in Passus V; as the scene of Christ's duel with Death, from which he emerges as Dux Vitae and Rex Gloriae in Passus XVIII. Central as the death of Christ is to Langland's thought, the cross does not figure as athe object of devotion, as it did in the art of his time, and in the meditative and mystical writers--the scenes of agony that absorbed Julian of Norwich are compassed. Langland's piety is spare, restrained, not affective. 

(external) English Literature I: the Medieval Period;English Literature and Culture From Medieval Period to the Eighteenth Century