“The Scholar-Gypsy”: An Applied Modern Pastoral

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In an age of doubt and skepticism, Matthew Arnold diagnoses melancholy and mental emptiness as the disease of Victorian society, and believes poetry must impart the emotional warmth and spiritual strength that religion had once offered. In “The Scholar-Gypsy,” inspired by a reading of Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) and even more by his own memory of Oxford days, Arnold creates a symbolic figure, “scholar-gypsy,” adequate to the burden of an immense nostalgia. Unlike the mythic and idyllic milieu of traditional pastoral, the poem ponders on the “strange disease of modern life” in the real landscape of Victorian society, thus can be called an applied modern pastoral. The old tale of the frustrated Oxford scholar becomes a parable of the modern man’s vain, lonely quest of unity and totality. Arnold’s pastoral vision of youth and integrity scores a triumph over the incessant change and division of modern times, through the distinctive poetics and the deft application of the traditional pastoralism, creating a complex fiction that incorporates contemporary ideas into the unconventional context. Arnold figures out the detached but elusive nature of a pastoral ideal, and comes to a fuller understanding of modern human condition.

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