Plan: Introduction

2.1 Metaphors, similes, alliteration and assonance used in the poem
Metaphors and Similes
Similes:
About Will: “I set off like a sheep in a shaggy woolen smock." In the New Testament, sheep represent saved Christians.
About the castle of Truth, which lies in the East, and is associated with light: “a castle that shines like the sun”
The Christ-Knight metaphor seems a case in point. Most critics agree that the central thrust of the metaphor in Piers Plowman occurs in Passus XVIII and XIX:
Oon semblable to the Samaritan, and somdeel to Piers the Plowman,
Barefoot on an asse bak booties cam prikye,
Withouten spores other spere; spakliche he loked,
As is the kynde of a knyght that cometh to be dubbed,
To geten hym gilte spores on galoches ycouped.7
When the dreamer asks Faith, “an heraud of armes” (XVIII 16), about who should “juste in Jerusalem” (XVIII 19), Faith replies:
‘This Jesus of his gentries wol juste in Piers armes,
In his helm and in his haubergeon — humana natura.
That Crist be noght biknowe here for consummates Deus,
In Piers paltok the Plowman this prikiere shal ryde;
For no dynt shal hym dere as in deitate Patris.’ (XVIII 22-26)
While the Christ-Knight metaphor in its unadorned or bare state continues throughout Passus XVIII,8 it surfaces for serious critical consideration once again in Passus XIX, where it functions as the foundation of what Pamela Gradon calls a “prismatic image which refracts the situation into all its implications.” When the dreamer asks Conscience whether the figure before him is “Jesus the justere” (XIX 10) or Piers, Conscience answers
Quod Conscience, and kneled tho,
‘Thise arn Piers armes — Hise colours and his cote armure;
ac he that cometh so blody
Is Crist with his cros, conquerour of Cristene.’ (XIX 12-14)
What we see in this “prismatic image” is a figure of speech which acts as the “concrete” basis of more elaborate “allegorical” expression. Clearly Langland’s emphasis lies with the theme of the Incarnation and Christ’s humanity, which these images convey through appropriate figurae. Although the Christ-Knight metaphor provides the “structure” of these images, the scaffold upon which other associations can be hung, it does not in itself convey more than a convenient and traditional comparison in these quotations. Gradon, for example, insists that the metaphor can and must be separated from the other elements fused with it. She observes that “we have a mixture of personification and of the analogies with Piers Plowman and the Good Samaritan and a knight going to joust.”10 The most important features of this mixture, she continues, are the “figurae” of Piers and the Good Samaritan; the Christ-Knight metaphor is a commonplace, providing “just the kind of allegorical narrative needed” but no more. Martin, too, voices the opinion that the metaphor serves a higher purpose. Christ rides in his “paltok,” she argues, but the ploughman’s garment “displaces the more glamorous metaphor of the knight’s armour and becomes the other nature of the abstract impassible Latinate divinity.”