The Power Of Allegorical Moral

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Maria Rigova

Dr. Georgi Niagolov

Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Part I: From Medieval to Renaissance

15 January 2013

 The Power of Allegorical Moral and Social Satire in William Langland’s Piers Plowman

The famous poem Piers Plowman is?? tense probably written around?? the second half of the fourteenth century. Although its writer’s name is not certain with the help of various interpretations, scholars have decided to accept that the name of the author is William Langland. According to different resources the writer poet? must have been a deeply religious Christian man. That is why in its essence Pier Plowman is an allegorical religious poem which aims to draw a clear line between good and evil, right and wrong in life. It is so because the author wants to satirize society and make the readers see the cruel reality they live in and realize how corrupt it is. Also his intention is to prove that life is a never ending battle between good and bad in human nature and that the meaning of the whole journey called life is to find that line, that balance between the material and the spiritual.

Overall the poem is a story about a person named Will who is exhausted so he falls asleep and dreams about going on a number of quests in which he participates along with other people and which share a common goal - to find something or somebody important or symbolically speaking they aim to find answers concerning the important things in life. Almost all of the quests are somehow connected to Christianity. His dreams and the quests themselves are quite symbolic. Each journey represents the path a person takes in order to mature, to find their place and to understand what is important and what is not. The interesting thing is that the goal changes a number of times, which sends the clear message that people have to face and deal with a lot of obstacles in their journey and that there are a lot of things worth fighting for.

In the very beginning of the poem the author makes it perfectly clear that the humans in his work are neither divine nor hellish creatures. They are simply locked somewhere in the middle between Heaven and Hell. Even the narrator himself is not attributed to one of the places. On the contrary, he is presented as someone who does not know where he belongs and has not matured yet. His name is also symbolic. It can be associated with human will- the power which helps people do the right thing. In order to do so he has to go through all the journeys and meet the people who will help him take the right or the wrong path. These people also are symbolic or to be more specific they are allegoric in their nature. They represent virtues and vice, the good and the bad. This instantly leads to the thought that every person is bound to make a choice and it depends only on them how to live their life. The different characters and places in the poem are arranged in space according to their qualities. For example Heaven is a "tower... worthily built" while Hell is a "dungeon… with dark…". This is the point after which Will’s journey begins.

In the first vision he meets many people – Lady Holy Church, Mede, The king, Reason, Wrong and others. They are all different qualities that are part of the human nature. Nevertheless not all of them are simply good or bad. Some of them are in between. The best example here is Mede. She can be a virtue or a sin. She is the symbol of money in the poem. They can be used in various ways, some of which bad , some good. That is why she has a dual personality. Each person has the right to decide what to do with their money. That is why it is difficult to decide what to do with Mede, she is unpredictable and unlike some of the rest characters she has to be whoever humans choose her to be. The meeting with this character is an obstacle for the process of maturing for Will. She is one of the temptations in life. The king who decides that Mede is dangerous is a person who have found the balance between good and bad- hence he makes the right decision. He is the representative of the human race.

After these events Will’s and other people’s second journey begins. He goes on a quest in order to find Truth. This event is symbolic as well. Sometimes people cannot separate the truth from the lie and the truth is hard to find. The character of Piers Plowman is an extreme, being a purely positive character. He is a peasant who has nothing. As one may suspect he knows the way to the Truth. He is the representative of all the good in the world. One can almost immediately make the association that most of the times poor people are more generous, humane and real than many rich people. Naturally a person like that should become the king in order to guide the others towards Heaven. On the way to finding the truth the people encounter Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest. They also are yet other symbols. Judging by their names the reader can easily come to the conclusion that the last one – Dobest- is the most positive way to live one’s life. It is probably a perfect mixture of the physical and the spiritual. A person who is associated with Dobest (like Pier Plowman) has found the balance between body and soul, good and bad. The other two probably are positive qualities as well but they are just parts of the Dobest. The fact that Dowel and Dobet are not the perfect qualities is proven by Will’s encounter with Haukyun. The reader can see that thee is something missing. The most important part in Haukyun’s character is his coat which has stains on it. These stains are the representations of Haukyun’s sins. Although once and a while he cleans his coat, the stains keep showing on its surface again. This aims to explain that the only way not to have any sins one has to be a part of the Dobest – the balance between soul and body.

The interesting part here is that the protagonist is not asleep throughout the whole poem. He wakes up a number of times and falls asleep again after that. He can only receive the lessons while he is asleep and them apply them in his real life. This is what the whole poem is about, the journey of young man who does not know what is good and bad.

In the next parts of the poem Will and the people meet other human qualities and each of them teaches Will an important lesson about life. Later in the poem Will hears a story from Piers Plowman, about The tree of Charity and its fruit. The tree is probably the representation of the human world, the fruit being the people who sooner or later fall from the tree in order for other fruit to come to life. The Devil who snatches the fallen fruit before Piers Plowman can save them is most likely to represent human sins which eat the souls of people- association with the Original Sin. That is why only God can Fight the Devil and save the human race. Piers Plowman can even be seen as Christ, the person who will save people on Earth and will kill the Devil. This is so because at the very end of the poem Conscience thinks about starting yet another journey – to find Piers Plowman. Suddenly the latter becomes the goal as was the Truth in the first part of the work. There are various opinions about the ending, whether it is good or bad. I probably is somewhere in the middle since there is another quest awaiting for the people. They cannot stop looking for answers. This symbolizes the fact that the obstacles and the need to find some greater truth never disappear and that they are a big part of the journey through life. People are taught various lessons throughout their whole lives until their journey ends.

The so called writer of the poem William Langland tries to summarize the whole life of a person along with its lessons in his work. He puts man in between two dimensions and tries to show his readers that everybody at one point has the opportunity to make a choice. A choice that affects his life and the path he is going to pick in the future. Everybody can learn how to differentiate between the good and the evil.There is a clear boarder between good and bad on a dimensional level. The author makes fun of the society and its laws. He reveals their true colours. The poem is filled with symbols which represent the right and the wrong. According to the poem they are an important part of people’s quest in search for the balance between body and soul.

SOURCES :

www.poetryfoundation.org – Biography of William Langland

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/iacd_99F/medieval_lit/data/piers_plowman.html

The Short Oxford History of English Literature

www.Wikipedia.org