Piers Plowman

Provider: Cecilia Liu / 劉雪珍

Dreamer

• The Dreamer: At first a spectator, then an interlocutor, he gradually comes to participate in the dream-action.  The involvement corresponds to his growth as a self-questioning, self-communing, Christian.  Development in self-knowledge characterizes the protagonists, or the poetic personae, of the greatest fourteenth-century poems: Gawain similarly, engaged on a more knightly quest, will emerge as a penitent figure aware for the first time of his frailty.  The allegorical figures that the Dreamer meets--Ymaginatif, Clergy, Study, Patience, represent qualities that he comes to value and even to assimilate. If at the close it is Conscience who becomes a pilgrim walking the world as the poet-dreamer does at the beginning, it is because only now is the Dreamer's Conscience fully apprised of the Person that he must seek.
• The poem reflects the actualities of Christian experience, the tension of an intensely serious and disturbed intelligence, rooted firmly in orthodox belief and practice yet alive to the disruption facing feudal society, and troubled by the failure of the Church and the religious orders to meet the crisis.  If the poem is not spiritual autobiography, it does reflect the struggle and aspiration of the poet to provide some light in the darkness for his fellow Christians. And at the close the reader has come to share, through the intermediacy of the Dreamer, his moods, his meditations, his exaltations. The Dreamer has allied himself to us by his very imperfections, his stubborn insistences.

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