Analyse the poem The Scholar-Gypsy in your own words with background of the poem.
Ans. 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 epitomises his paradoxical combination of Victorian vigour and social progressivism with a protomodernist sense of dissociation arising from religious doubt, social frag mentation and ennui. The various places and landmarks mentioned in the poem are all actual ones situated around Oxford.
The Shepherd is summoned to the hills to untie the wattle cotes: sheepfolds built of wattles or interwoven twigs; neither to leave his wistful flock unfed nor let his bawling fellows neither rack their throats nor allow the cropped grasses shoot another head. However, when the fields are calm and still and tired men and dogs all to rest, one can see only the white sheep cross the strips of the moon blanched green, the Shepherd must again renew the quest; the search for the Scholar Gypsy who is believed to be still haunting the vicinity. "The Scholar-Gypsy" is often known as one of the best and most popular poems of Arnold. A poor Oxford university student constitutes the central character of "The Scholar Gypsy" who abandoned his studies to learn about the supernatural powers of the Gypsy people. Arnold begins the poem in pastoral mode, invoking an unnamed shepherd and describing the beautiful rural scene, with Oxford in the distance. The very first stanza of the poem suggests that something is amiss because the speaker imagines the sheep at night on a “moon blanched green" and then persuades the shepherd to "again begin the quest". The moon acts like a symbol for the power of imagination and the world 'quest' appears to be a very loaded term for rustic job of a shepherd. The pastoralism of the poem leads immediately to several themes. Most generally, it represents, as it does for many poets, an escape from the intolerable world of court or affairs. He then repeats the gist of Glanvill's story, but extends it with an account of rumours that the scholar Gypsy was again seen from time to time by shepherds, country boys, young girls and reapers, etc. around Oxford.
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