Piers Plowman

Piers Plowman, or The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman, allegorical dream-poem in alliterative verse, written by William Langland in the west midlands of England during the second half of the 14th century. It is one of the three great works of the Alliterative Revival (the other two being the anonymously written Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory).

The poem survives in about 50 manuscripts, in three widely differing versions, called the A, B, and C texts, representing Langland's progressive revisions of the poem. The A-text was probably written between 1367 and 1370 and totals 2,567 lines; the B-text totals 7,277 lines and probably dates from between 1377 and 1379; the C-text is about as long as the B-text, and dates from around 1385 or 1386.

The poem is wide-ranging and digressive in structure (the 20th-century novelist and critic C. S. Lewis described it as “confused and monotonous”), making extensive use of allegory and taking the form of a series of dream-visions. Each version of the poem is divided into two parts, the “Visio” and “Vita,” which are themselves divided into visions and passus (sections) of unequal length (12 in the A-text, 20 in the B-text, 23 in the C-text).

The poem is narrated by the dreamer, who finds himself engaged on a pilgrimage in search of Truth and Charity. He becomes involved in a series of extraordinary allegorical adventures in which he meets a number of personified abstractions (such as Wit, Thought, Study, Clergy, and Reason), and has a series of visions (including, most famously, a vision of Christ's crucifixion and the Harrowing of Hell). The character of Piers Plowman is a part of the complex allegory of the poem. He appears variously as a humble servant of God, the Good Samaritan, and as an incarnate Christ.

Piers Plowman is a vivid portrayal of 14th-century life, which also deals with the great questions of faith and destiny. It is a poem of strange repetitions and sudden transitions, which swings wildly between burlesque, satire, and high seriousness.

The language of the poem is a rich medieval west midland English, peppered with Latin quotations. The B-text begins:

The modern reader will find it necessary to use a translation or an annotated edition.

Although no edition of the poem was published between 1550 and 1813, Piers Plowman has had a surprising influence on later 19th- and 20th-century writing. The T.S. Eliot poem “Little Gidding”, for example, begins with an allusion to the opening of Langland's poem (“Midwinter spring is its own season/ Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,/ Suspended in time, between pole and tropic”), as does “The Schooner Flight” by West Indian poet Derek Walcott, from his collection The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979):