The Malay Took The Pearl - Analysis

A speaker who wants the pearl but can’t bear the cost

The poem’s central drama is a confession of desire that keeps disguising itself as scruple. The speaker says, The Malay took the Pearl / Not I the Earl, immediately setting up a class-marked I who believes entitlement (being the Earl) should equal possession, yet who also insists on innocence. What stops the speaker is not lack of interest but a self-protective fear: I feared the Sea too much, and the sea becomes the place where wanting turns into risk, labor, and moral exposure. The pearl stands for the prize the speaker craves, but also for a kind of destiny the speaker wants to receive cleanly—without the wet, dangerous work of getting it.

Holiness as an alibi: Unsanctified to touch

The most revealing move is how the speaker translates fear into spiritual language. Unsanctified to touch suggests the pearl is sacred—or that the act of taking it would stain the taker. But the poem quickly undermines that pious posture: the speaker is also Praying that I might be / Worthy the Destiny, as if worthiness could be achieved without action. The prayer sounds less like humility than like a wish to be rewarded for restraint. The tension here is sharp: the speaker wants the status of purity and the profit of possession at the same time, and the poem keeps catching the speaker trying to have both.

Who swims, who stays dry

Against the speaker’s immobility, the poem places a body in motion: The Swarthy fellow swam and bore my Jewel Home. The possessive my arrives before any rightful claim has been earned, which is the poem’s quiet indictment. The one who risks the sea is described only by racialized surface—Malay, Swarthy, later Negro—as if identity is reduced to color and function. Meanwhile the speaker’s identity is tied to title (Earl) and interior life (fear, prayer, judgment). The poem’s moral imbalance is not subtle: one person does the work and faces danger; the other narrates, owns, and rationalizes.

The poem’s turn: Home to the Hut!

The hinge comes with a sudden recoil: Home to the Hut! What lot / Had I the Jewel got. The speaker imagines the pearl brought not to a manor but to a Hut, and that prospect becomes a kind of horror. The disgust intensifies in bodily detail: the jewel is Borne on a Dusky Breasty. The pearl’s journey across another person’s chest contaminates it in the speaker’s imagination. Even the attempt to sound tasteful—a Vest / Of Amber fit—betrays a harsh hierarchy: the speaker can picture ornament and luxury, but not in proximity to the laboring body that retrieved the ornament. This is where the poem shows its ugliest truth: the speaker’s fear of the sea may be real, but the deeper fear is social and racial proximity.

A love story that never becomes a claim

In the final stanza, the speaker admits a private rivalry: The Negro never knew / I wooed it too. The verb wooed turns the pearl into a beloved, and casts the pursuit as romance rather than extraction—another softening strategy. Yet the speaker’s stakes are extreme: To gain, or be undone. The line makes the desire sound life-or-death, even though earlier the speaker refused the literal life-and-death risk of the sea. The last sting is the speaker’s resentment that this passion means nothing to the swimmer: Alike to Him One. The worker is imagined as indifferent, which conveniently erases any claim he might have to the pearl—and also erases the speaker’s guilt. The contradiction tightens: the speaker’s obsession is intense, but it is an obsession that depends on someone else’s danger and someone else’s silence.

The hard question the poem won’t let go of

If the pearl is destiny, why does the speaker need another body to fetch it? The poem seems to argue that the speaker’s notion of worthiness is built on staying sanctified by refusing the sea, while still hoping the prize arrives Home. In that light, the final confession isn’t just envy of the swimmer—it’s an exposure of a moral fantasy: to possess what you wouldn’t touch, and to call your refusal a virtue.