Reading 164, from Matthew Arnold

The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at Preferment’s door,
One summer-morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy-lore,
And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

But once, years after, in the country-lanes,
Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,
Met him, and of his way of life inquired.
Whereat he answer’d, that the Gipsy-crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
The workings of men’s brains:
And they can bind them to what thoughts they will:
“And I,” he said, “the secret of their art,
When fully learn’d, will to the world impart:
But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill!”

This said, he left them, and return’d no more,
But rumours hung about the country-side
That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,
The same the gipsies wore.
Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;
At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,
On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock’d boors
Had found him seated at their entering,

But, ‘mid their drink and clatter, he would fly:
And I myself seem half to know thy looks,
And put the shepherds, Wanderer! on thy trace;
And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks
I ask if thou hast pass’d their quiet place;
Or in my boat I lie
Moor’d to the cool bank in the summer-heats,
‘Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,
And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills,
And wonder if thou haunt’st their shy retreats.

For most, I know, thou lov’st retired ground.
Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe,
Returning home on summer-nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the slow punt swings round;
And leaning backwards in a pensive dream,
And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers
Pluck’d in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,
And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.

And then they land, and thou art seen no more!–
Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come
To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,
Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,
Or cross a stile into the public way.
Oft thou hast given them store
Of flowers–the frail-leaf’d, white anemony,
Dark bluebells drench’d with dews of summer eves,
And purple orchises with spotted leaves–
But none hath words she can report of thee…

The Scholar Gipsy

Matthew Arnold

My notes:

Arnold’s scholar is many things to many men but to me he is the life given to the search of mystique. And scholarship, the old familiar kind, is fast disappearing; giving way to meaningless twaddle. Of course the sense of twaddleship coupled with loads of cash from peddling nonsensical skills makes us believe that the bunkum is in fact high learning. Scholarship needs retirement and fleeing from the world. Being scholarly is to search for the unknown.

Image: Thanks for the Image.