The Scholar Gipsy (1853)
Author: Matthew Arnold
Genre: Elegy, topographical poem
Based on: Joseph Glanvill’s The
Vanity of Dogmatizing
The Scholar Gipsy, is pastoral in
setting, based on an old legend, narrated by Glanvill in his The Vanity of
Dogmatizing, of an ‘Oxford scholar
poor’, who, tired of the world and
joined the gypsies to learn their lore, roamed with them, and still
haunts the Oxford countryside.
The speaker describes a folksy rural
setting in the outskirts of the Oxford town. He spectates the scenic beauty of
the field and the working way of the shepherd and reapers, then he tells the
shepherd that he is going to sit back and enjoy there until sunset by seeing
the beautiful scenario out there. All the while he kept a book beside him; in
that book there’s a story written by Joseph Glanvill about an Oxford student
who leaves his studies to join a band of gypsies to know their lifestyle, and
to untangle the web of secrecy.
After a long time, no trace of
the Scholar Gipsy is found. All of a sudden, two of his oxford associates found
him and enquired about his absence and whereabouts, he told them about the learning
style of the gypsies, which give stress to vivid imagination. He further added
that, his plan is to learn about gypsies and to reveal their secrets to the
world.
The speaker regularly adding his
own whims and fancies into the narration, and also the hearsay of the fellow people
live around him. Many claim that they have seen the gipsy in the moors of
Berkshire. Out of this statement, the speaker envisaged gipsy as a shadowy
figure who is waiting for the “spark from heaven”.
Even
the speaker claims that he has seen the gipsy by himself once, despite the
prolonged time of two hundred years, he doesn’t found it easy to accept it
without any difficulties. Because he envisaged gipsy as an immortal, due to his
renunciation of his mortal life; the gipsy has liberated himself from the jeopardy
of the modern world, which affects the modern mortals as a “strange disease”
and destroy men in a large numbers.
