Piers Plowman

Piers Plowman will very likely be on your exam. Be able to recognize the beginning of the poem; it might be worth looking at a footnoted version of the poem so you get a sense of what's going on and how the language works. Likely questions will concern the verse form (unrhymed alliterative verse) and translations of some of the words in the opening.

Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William's Vision of Piers Plowman ) is the title of an apocalyptic Middle English allegorical narrative written by William Langland . It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called "passus" (Latin for "step"). Piers is considered one of the early great works of English literature . It is one of a very few Middle English poems that can stand beside Chaucer's Canterbury Tales . The poem concerns the narrator's intense quest for the true Christian life, in the terms of the medieval Catholic mind. That quest entails a series of dream-visions and an examination into the lives of three allegorical characters, Do-Wel ( "Do-Well" ), Do-Bet ( "Do-Better" ), and Do-Best, who are sought by Piers, the humble plowman of the title. The poem begins on the hillside of Malvern Hill in Malvern, Worcestershire .

The poem is written in unrhymed alliterative verse.

It begins:

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.
I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste
Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;
And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,
I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye..