United States or Jamaica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"The Scholar-Gipsy" and "Thyrsis" contain many references to Oxford and the surrounding country, but they are more noticeable for their spirit of aloofness, as if Oxford men were too much occupied with classic dreams and ideals to concern themselves with the practical affairs of life.
Then we have three things, of which the first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did. These are The Church of Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar-Gipsy.
And so it is but rarely that we get things like the Scholar-Gipsy, like the Forsaken Merman, like the second Isolation; and when we do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the peroration to Sohrab and Rustum, and perhaps the splendid opening of Westminster Abbey and Thyrsis, a certain sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe.
But the greatest of these the greatest by far is The Scholar-Gipsy. I have read and that not once only, nor only in the works of unlettered and negligible persons expressions of irritation at the local Oxonian colour. This is surely amazing. One may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to enjoy the local colour of the Phædrus.
One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies coal, iron, steam a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's.
And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the Shakespeare sonnet, to The Scholar-Gipsy, to the Isolation stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.
If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, sans phrase."
"Yes, there are stories registered on high, Yes, there are stains Time's fingers cannot blot"; in which kind he was to produce some years later the matchless "Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade," of the Scholar-Gipsy.
Merton and the House, New College and Magdalen Tower he saw the enchanted city across Christ Church meadows from the river, he looked down upon it from Headington, and again from those high fields where, at twilight, the scholar-gipsy used to roam. For the letter was in the hand of Harry Luttrell. He tore it open and read: "Some one in London is asking for you. Who it is I don't know.
Also this may account for the strong way in which a gipsy woman is often drawn to the “Tarno Rye,” the young English gentleman of whom Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote the ‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ and her fidelity to whom is so striking. It is often in such relations as these with the Tarno Rye that the instinct of monogamy in the Romany woman is seen.
Word Of The Day