And goode faire White she het;
That was my la dy name ryght.
She was bothe fair and bryght;
She hadde not hir name wrong.
(Boke of the Duchesse, 948–51).
THE [OC]: We offer you a gift. Return to us the human on your Tardis and in exchange, you may speak with her again.
OLD GRANDFATHER :
Speak with whom?
(A shadowy figure walks out of a ground floor archway with a bright light behind her.)
OLD GRANDFATHER :
Young lady, who are you?
PEARL :
Is he here? Is the Doctor here?
(Her Doctor, Dr. Disco AttackEyebrows comes out of the TARDIS.)
PEARL:
Doctor!
(they hug)
I knew it! I did, I knew it. I knew you couldn't be dead, you don't have the concentration. Doctor? What are you doing?
(He scans her with the sonic screwdriver.)
AttackEyebrows:
Just keep still, please. Pearl.
PEARL:
Yeah.
AttackEyebrows:
My friend Pearl was turned into a Cyberman.
She gave her life so that people she barely knew could live.
So, let's be clear. NOBODY imitates Bill Potts.
Nobody MOCKS Pearl
Pearl:
Bill Potts is standing right in front of you.
DOCTOR:
How is that even possible?
BILL: Well, long story short.
I totally pulled.
The Queen of Courtesy. Do you remember, The Girl in The Puddle?
Well, She showed up. She came for me.
‘O perle’, quod I, ‘in perle  py  t,
Art þou my perle þat I haf playned?’
" It has been objected that the child as seen in Heaven is not like an infant of two in appearance, speech, or manners: she addresses her father formally as sir, and shows no filial affection for him.
But this is an apparition of a spirit, a soul not yet reunited with its body after the resurrection, so that theories relevant to the form and age of the glorified and risen body do not concern us.
And as an immortal spirit, the maiden’s relations to the earthly man, the father of her body, are altered.
She does not deny his fatherhood, and when she addresses him as sir she only uses the form of address that was customary for medieval children. Her part is in fact truly imagined.
The sympathy of readers may now go out more readily to the bereaved father than to the daughter, and they may feel that he is treated with some hardness.
But it is the hardness of truth. In the manner of the maiden is portrayed the effect upon a clear intelligence of the persistent earthliness of the father’s mind; all is revealed to him, and he has eyes, yet he cannot see. The maiden is now filled with the spirit of celestial charity, desiring only his eternal good and the cure of his blindness.
It is not her part to soften him with pity, or to indulge in childish joy at their reunion.
The final consolation of the father was not to be found in the recovery of a beloved daughter, as if death had not after all occurred or had no significance, but in the knowledge that she was redeemed and saved and had become a queen in Heaven.
Only by resignation to the will of God, and through death, could he rejoin her.
And this is the main purpose of the poem as distinct from its genesis or literary form: the doctrinal theme, in the form of an argument on salvation, by which the father is at last convinced that his Pearl, as a baptized infant and innocent, is undoubtedly saved, and, even more, admitted to the blessed company of the 144,000 that follow the Lamb.
But the doctrinal theme is, in fact, inseparable from the literary form of the poem and its occasion; for it arises directly from the grief, which imparts deep feeling and urgency to the whole discussion. Without the elegiac basis and the sense of great personal loss which pervades it, Pearl would indeed be the mere theological treatise on a special point, which some critics have called it.
But without the theological debate the grief would never have risen above the ground.
Dramatically the debate represents a long process of thought and mental struggle, an experience as real as the first blind grief of bereavement. In his first mood, even if he had been granted a vision of the blessed in Heaven, the dreamer would have received it incredulously or rebelliously.
And he would have awakened by the mound again, not in the gentle and serene resignation of the last stanza, but still as he is first seen, looking only backward, his mind filled with the horror of decay, wringing his hands, while his wreched wylle in wo ay wrazte. "
Prof. J.R.R. Tolkein's introduction to Pearl
38 The court where the living God doth reign