I will have to agree, this text was rather difficult to read. Actually, it was quite lovely to read, just difficult to understand. The first thing I noticed of course was Langland's use of alliteration. It is obviously his strongest poetic devise in Piers Plowman. It brings more strength to the poem than simple rhyme would have like we read in the Canterbury Tales. Not only do I think it is a much more challenging device to use than rhyme, but it just sounds better. Though it seems a tad over done, I think it adds a lot to the peom. The alliterated words always brought out the most important points. Langland used them to keep our eyes open for key words. Lines 325-26 are alliterated by the sound of the letter L: "Lucifer could not look, the light so blinded him./And those that the Lord loved his light caught away." Interesting how in one line Langland is talking about the Devil and in the second he speaks of God, yet he chooses terms that both start with the letter L. Perhaps Langland wants to believe that Satan and God are one in the same. As in, he does not really believe in the church and considers the two opposites at basically the same level of imagination. Over-analyzation, it may be, but at least it's a shot in a barely lit room.

Something else I noticed in Langland's patterns of alliteration were the frequency of certain sounds. It seemed to me that the sound of a G came up quite often. There are many phrases about being beguiled in the last few pages of Passus 18. In line 360 Langland uses both repetition and alliteration to help guide his main points: "And guile is beguilded and grief has come to his guile." What I take from this is a huge theme of trickery. I'm not exactly sure why, but I can tell you it's very important. Hopefully someone in discussion will be able to take this theme a little further than I can.

I found it very interesting that Langland used the four daughters of Christ (Peace, Righteousness, Mercy, and Truth) in a personified way. (Personification, yet another poetic device.) Truth came across as very calm and laid back to me because she is all-knowing and without worry. She is constantly telling everyone to be "silent" (163, 260). I presume this is both in an attempt to end the argument between the daughters and to claim her position as truth again because she supposedly knows all that really matters. I don't quite understand why they are all fighting, but they do "make up" at the end: "Mercy and Truth have met together, Righteousness and Peace/ have kissed each other" (422-23). Apparently this is a verse from the Bible. It seems just another way that Langland uses allegory in his poem. I am, once again, not sure what the signifance of it is, but I know that it becomes the end of his dream. After this happens it appears that the "good guys" triumph and all is well, yet I get the distinct feeling that Langland did not write this poem merely to point out the power of Jesus against evil. Everything seems more satirical to me, partly because of the personification of the four daughters and the event of Jesus' visit to hell. It just doesn't seem right, especially for a middle English writer because anything other than "The Word" was considered heresey. Maybe Langland was angry at the church and this pushed him to give birth to Piers Plowman.