Piers Plowman

Attempted to read it once but just couldn't get through it. ( )

I read the version published in Everyman and edited by A. V. C. Schmidt. This is the B text in Middle English and I found it a struggle to read. Having just read the Riverside Chaucer I was fairly optimistic I would cope with this, but Langland's English is different again and it has taken me about six weeks to read it through.

At the start of the poem Will is found wandering around the countryside and becoming tired he lays down to sleep and has a dream vision. This happens eight times during the course of the poem and so it does feel that the it stops and starts, sometimes covering ground previously covered. If I had to summarise the poem I would say that these visions demonstrate to Will what it takes to be a good Christian. The visions are in effect sermons or homily's in an allegorical framework, which at times spring into life and make it worthwhile to struggle on with the text. An example is the description of Gluttony:

His guttes gonne to gothelen as two gredy sowes;
He pissed a potel in a Paternoster-while
And blew his rounde ruwet at his ruggebones ende
That all that herde that horn helde hir nose after....

This example shows the alliteration that runs through the whole poem and makes it fun to read aloud

The poem has been the subject of much literary criticism and has been described as:

"An attack on church and state, a poem with unity"
or
"Has a tendency to rambling and vagueness sometimes degenerating into incoherence."

For me the answer lies somewhere between these two viewpoints. There are certainly vigorous attacks on the clergy especially the mendicant friars and on rich people in general, with an exhortation for the common man to follow the scriptures. This led me to wonder what audience had Langland in mind when he wrote the poem. It would have been far out of the reach of even the educated common man.

The text contains many Latin phrases, which are translated in footnotes in this version. The glosses beside the text are sometimes essential for an understanding but sometimes they get in the way and I found it was better to ignore them and just plough through reading aloud. This is not an essential read, but then I am glad I took the time to battle with it, perhaps I would have been better to have read it in translation, but then I would have missed out on the poetry of the original ( )

Got through a little under half of this. The allegories are an interesting reflection of religious, political and social issues of the time, but I felt no urge to continue with it. The author's background is a stark contrast from that of his contemporary, Chaucer, and very little is known about William Langland, who exists only through the clues in the work itself - there is no other contemporary evidence of his existence.

A religious poem from the Middle Ages that deals with problems of the times and the Christian attitude towards God. The author contemplates life and death and sin and the role the church plays in each. He enters different settings through dreams as he explores different aspects of Christianity to solve his dilemma. ( )

This review is based on "Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text" (Oxford World's Classics), an accessible, smooth translation in modern English prose, by A. V. C. Schmidt. He includes a thorough introduction and extensive but unobtrusive notes, like an optional running commentary. Piers Plowman is an allegorical narrative poem written in the late 14th century by William Langland, a poor parish clerk. Scholars of English Literature consider this work important not only as the first literature identifiable as presenting the peasants' outlook, but also as one of the highest achievements of medieval English poetry. On one level, the narrative is a sequence of allegorical visions satirizing the political and social abuses of the time. On another level, it is a story about the journey of one man, Long Will, to find truth, to learn how to do-well, do-better, and do-best in a world crowded with opposing distractions. I found the work to be a fun way to learn about the issues of the times, an entertaining exercise for my imagination, and a profound study of what it means to be a Christian. ( )