Victorian Poetry

Experimental form in Victorian poetry

such a view poetry provides access to a metaphysical absolute, one free
from material taint - including its embodiment in sign and print. But here
Arnold, in the final decade of his career, attempts to make large claims for
poetry as a cultural substitute for religion, while his own poetry (much of it
written in the 1840s and 1850s) belies the theory. Whether exposed on
darkling plains, wandering between worlds, or dying in craters, his fraught
speakers show all too often the limitations of materialism or the failures of
idealism. In particular, "The Scholar-Gipsy" (1852) exemplifies what we
might call the Victorian formalist dilemma where a poet like Arnold not
only seeks the conditions of aesthetic wholeness and transcendent truth but
also wishes to incorporate the conflicting conditions of mid-nineteenth-
century values.

"The Scholar-Gipsy" rests upon a conflict between the values of pastoral
(the relaxed peacefulness and untainted idealism manifested in the simple
life of shepherds) and modernity (the confused, aimless and mechanized life
of Victorian England). The poem begins with the celebration of a pastoral
setting wherein a shepherd is urged, once he has fed his "wistful flock" (MA
3), to begin again "the quest" (a "quest," we assume, for the Oxford
scholar-gipsy of the title). The poet-speaker, however, remains separate. He
sits and waits, "Screen'd" in a "nook" (21). Instead of actively joining the
pastoral context, he reads again Joseph Glanvill's book - The Vanity of
Dogmatizing (1661) - which Arnold purchased in 1844. In this seven-
teenth-century work, Glanvill recalls "lately a lad in the University of
Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts, and yet wanting the
encouragement of preferment, was by his poverty forced to leave his studies
there, and to cast himself upon the wide world for his livelihood ... he was
at last forced to join himself to a company of vagabond gypsies." 13 This
"lad" enjoys the gypsy life for some time before he is discovered by some of
his former university friends, who take him back in their company. Arnold's
poet-speaker undertakes to reimagine the young scholar's extraordinary
story, locating his adventures within the harmonious naturalness of the
Oxfordshire countryside. After thirteen stanzas, however, the appeal to
literary pastoralism is dismissed: "But what," the speaker exclaims, "I
dream!" (131). With this abrupt turn, he introduces the contrasting realities
that comprise "this strange disease of modern life" (203). The opening
evocation of the fields near Oxford as a repetition of pastoral values
transmutes, then, into the recognition that these values belong to an
outmoded and idealized past - the dream provoked by "Glanvill's book"
(31). Subsequently, the organicist detail of the opening description ("round
green roots and yellowing stalks I see / Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils
creep" [24-25]), repeating the specificity of Romantic - indeed Keatsian -

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