Deep in her unknown day's employ.
Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
15 What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirred forest, fresh and clear.
Scarce fresher is the mountain sod
Where the tired angler lies, stretched out,
And, eased of basket and of rod,
20 Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout. In the huge world, which roars hard0 by, close
Be others happy if they can!
3. A river near Wordsworth's burial place. 2. Sheep sometimes grazed in London parks. 1. A park in the heart of London.
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TH E SCHOLA R GYPS Y / 136 1 But in my helpless cradle I Was breathed on by the rural Pan.3 25 I, on men's impious uproar hurled, Think often, as I hear them rave, That peace has left the upper world And now keeps only in the grave. 30Yet here is peace forever new! When I who watch them am away, Still all things in this glade go through The changes of their quiet day. 35Then to their happy rest they pass! The flowers upclose, the birds are fed, The night comes down upon the grass, The child sleeps warmly in his bed. 40Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar. The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live. 1852
The Scholar Gypsy The story of a seventeenth-century student who left
Oxford and joined a band of gypsies had made a strong impression on Arnold. In the
poem he wistfully imagines that the spirit of this scholar is still to be encountered in
the Cumner countryside near Oxford, having achieved immortality by a serene pursuit
of the secret of human existence. Like Keats's nightingale, the scholar has escaped
'the weariness, the fever, and the fret' of modern life. At the outset the poet addresses a shepherd who has been helping him in his search
for traces of the scholar. The shepherd is addressed as you. After line 61, with the
shift to thou and thy, the person addressed is the scholar, and the poet thereafter
sometimes uses the pronoun we to indicate he is speaking for all humanity of later
generations. About the setting Arnold wrote to his brother Tom on May 15, 1857: 'You alone
of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the freest and most delightful
part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the
bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten
Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a poem of mine called 'The
Scholar Gipsy'? It was meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings
of ours in the Cumner Hills.' The passage from Joseph Glanvill's Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) that inspired the
poem was included by Arnold as a note:
3. In Greek mythology the god of woods and pastures.
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36 2 / MATTHEW ARNOLD
There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty
forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of
vagabond gypsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty
of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they
discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in
the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been
of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gypsies;
and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of
life, and told them that the people he went with were not such imposters as they
were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and
could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others:
that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the
