The Scholar-Gipsy by Matthew Arnold

First published: 1853

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” the major British Victorian poet’s central poem, anticipates the crisis of the modernist period. The poem is testament to Arnold’s preoccupation as a poet and a cultural critic: “this strange disease of modern life.” Arnold returns to this theme throughout his work, including in his poetic masterpieces Thyrsis (1866) and “Dover Beach” (1867) and in his major work of prose criticism, Culture and Anarchy (1869). “The Scholar-Gipsy” serves as a template for Arnold’s poetic and intellectual career and epitomizes his paradoxical combination of Victorian vigor and social progressivism with a protomodernist sense of dissociation arising from religious doubt, social fragmentation, and ennui.

Written in a ten-line stanzaic pattern for a total of 250 lines, the poem is a major English pastoral elegy in the tradition of John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637) and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). It bears the imprint of Arnold’s classicism, with allusions to Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553) and its masterful conclusion in the form of an epic simile. At the same time, however, Arnold seems to undermine the sense of tradition, poetic or cultural, that he is seeking to maintain. The traditional pastoral elegy seeks to reaffirm a continuity between past and present and between the person who has died and the still-existing values that he or she had embodied.

The subject of Arnold’s elegy is a legendary, poor Oxford University student of the seventeenth century who has abandoned his studies to learn the occult ways of the nomadic Roma, or gypsy, people. The Scholar-Gipsy is portrayed not as dead but as existing in an immortal twilight of the Romantic imagination. Moreover, rather than reinforce a sense of cultural continuity, Arnold is at pains to warn his elegiac “subject” away from deadening contact with the modern world, which is portrayed as radically alien in form and values from those he inhabits.

Arnold’s unusual pastoral elegy begins well within the expectations of the genre. The poem’s speaker addresses an unnamed shepherd and describes the timeless pastoral duties involved in the care and feeding of his flock. However, even the first stanza suggests something is amiss, as the speaker pictures the sheep at night on a “moon-blanched green” and then urges the symbolic shepherd to “again begin the quest.” The moon becomes a symbol for the power of the imagination, and “quest” seems like a strong word for a simple shepherd’s job of rounding up sheep. The speaker interjects himself into the poem in the second stanza, portraying himself seated in a field high in the Cumnor Hills overlooking his alma mater, Oxford University. The speaker becomes both participant and observer of the setting: He catalogs the flowers in the field but also mentions a decidedly unnatural object that he has brought with him: Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), which contains the original account of the Scholar-Gipsy.

In the subsequent four stanzas the natural world and pastoral convention disappear, as the speaker recounts the legend of the Scholar-Gipsy. Unsuccessful in knocking at “Preferment’s door,” the Scholar-Gipsy abandons Oxford University on a seeming whim “to learn the Gipsy lore.” Though the Scholar-Gipsy is a product of the seventeenth century, his quest for a natural philosophy or mystic connection with the spirit manifest in nature seems more in accordance with the British Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Scholar-Gipsy seeks a power of imagination capable of creating and not simply reflecting reality. Like the prophet-wizard at the conclusion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (1816), the Scholar-Gipsy wants to learn the gypsy “arts to rule as they desired/ The Workings of men’s brains” and, moreover, “the secret of their art,/ When fully learn’d, . . . to the world impart.” The Scholar-Gipsy is a Romantic revolutionary who seeks to improve the world not through the industrial innovations of Victorian materialism but through a spiritual purification and reunification of humans with the universal spirit within nature.

The next seven stanzas continue the narrative of the Scholar-Gipsy’s quest for a divine knowledge that could reconcile human and divine, matter and spirit. However, the Scholar-Gipsy is both present and absent in the passage. The poem recalls various sightings of its subject from the time he left Oxford to the poem’s present. He appears on the banks of “the stripling Thames [River] at Bablock-hithe,” with peasant children at play among the Cumnor Hills, amid the gypsy camps of Bagley Wood, and finally upon a “causeway chill” in the dead of winter. The Scholar-Gipsy—both a seemingly real person and figure of myth—appears and disappears in all seasons. Significantly, neither Arnold nor his speaker seem capable of imagining the Scholar-Gipsy’s quest “for the spark from heaven to fall” from the Scholar-Gipsy’s interior point of view. The subject of the poem remains oddly absent.

The poem’s major break comes with the line “But what—I dream!” His imaginative reverie broken, the speaker at first acknowledges in accordance with nineteenth century realism that the Scholar-Gipsy must be long since dead and, in an allusion to Thomas Gray, “in some quiet churchyard laid.” However, like Romantic poet John Keats, who endows a common bird with the immortality of the imagination in “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), Arnold’s speaker suddenly declares that the Scholar-Gipsy, too, lives on and has achieved his quest for immortality because he has remained untainted by contact with ennui and the spiritual desolation of the modern world: “O Life unlike to ours?/ Who fluctuate idly without term or scope.” Arnold’s speaker can imagine the possibility of imaginative transcendence and the validity of waiting for the “spark from Heaven”; however, he resolutely denies the possibility for his contemporaries, “Vague half-believers of our casual creeds,” including even “our wisest,” limited to mere lamentation for “the dying spark of hope.”

The final five stanzas complete the break with the pastoral elegy and almost subvert literary tradition itself. In self-disgust, Arnold’s speaker urges the Scholar-Gipsy to maintain his immortal spirit of transcendent imagination, which can only be accomplished by fleeing contact with the modern world, which is “feverish” and infected with “mental strife.” The final two stanzas provide an epic simile for a modern world no longer capable of epic thought or in tune with the wisdom of classical tradition. The passage compares the modern audience in the antique garb of a “Tyrian trader,” who has mastered the waves and commerce of material goods. However, the Scholar-Gipsy must maintain his distance to avoid the infection of modern life—like Iberian “[s]hy traffickers” of antiquity who traded with a more technologically advanced Tyrian culture but shunned actual contact with it to maintain their unity of culture—leaving their goods on the shore for Tyrian traders to pick up and leave their own trade-goods in return.

Bibliography

Farell, John Philip. “’The Scholar-Gipsy’ and the Continuous Life of Victorian Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 43, no. 3 (Fall, 2005): 277-296. Argues that “The Scholar-Gipsy” is not a sign of Arnold’s despair over the continuation of the English poetic tradition but an ultimately positive link in its “continuous” history.

Grob, Alan. A Longing Like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry of Pessimism. Dover: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Grob finds the influence of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on Arnold. Arnold’s poetry, such as “The Scholar-Gipsy,” illustrates Schopenhauer’s dichotomy of the artist engaged in the paradoxical activity of trying to escape the experience of suffering while creating art about it.

Hamilton, Ian. A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Hamilton, a poet and author of a definitive biography of poet Robert Lowell, examines Arnold’s life as a deliberate renunciation of his poetic gift to focus on broad social causes. “The Scholar-Gipsy” epitomizes the tragic division in Arnold’s life between timeless poet and prosaic man of his time.

Machann, Clinton. Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. A succinct and well-articulated exposition of Arnold’s intellectual and literary concerns, spanning his career in chronological chapters.

Mazzeno, Laurence W. Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 1999. Mazzeno surveys the critical response to Arnold. Resembles an annotated bibliography in that it treats its material item by item. A good resource for students new to Arnold and his work.

Moldstad, David. “The Imagination in The Vanity of Dogmatizing and ’The Scholar-Gipsy’: Arnold’s Reversal of Glanvill.” Victorian Poetry 25, no. 2 (Summer, 1987): 159-172. Moldstad argues that Arnold did not merely use Joseph Glanvill’s legend of the scholar-gypsy as a starting point for his own poem. Rather, Arnold reverses Glanvill’s seventeenth century distrust of the imagination to a positive identification with the creative faculty capable of transcending the limitations of rationality.

Trotter, David. “Hidden Ground Within: Matthew Arnold’s Lyric and Elegiac Poetry.” English Literary History 44, no. 3 (Autumn, 1977): 526-553. Examines Arnold’s development of the Romantic conceit of the gypsy (Roma) as social outsider. Trotter argues that “The Scholar-Gipsy,” and Arnold’s other early poetry, acts as a “hidden ground” or a personal zone exempt from Victorian materialism and positivism.