Michael Peverett: Notes on "The Scholar-Gipsy"

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Notes on "The Scholar-Gipsy"

[Image source: https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/M426226/Matthew-Arnold-poem-The-Scholar-Gipsy . Illustration by Henry Ospovat (1877 - 1909).]

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill ;
Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes !
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head,
But when the fields are still,
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green,
Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest !

*

The first of 25 stanzas, and not perhaps one of the best, but I didn't feel like excerpting from later because the poem is an unbroken arc. We don't quite believe in this shepherd or this quest: the poet finds his scholar-gipsy in his own meditation, not in an actual search (for a man who, after all, lived two centuries before).

And the beginning is a little confusing. "They" are the sheep, left penned on the hill. The sheep are also the "bawling fellows" of the fourth line.

I suppose the fifth line ("Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head") means the pasture outside the sheepcote, into which the hungry sheep will be released. but calling it already "cropp'd" puts us on the wrong scent. Once we work it out, we see that this herbage was cropped by the sheep before they were penned. In the next few hours, with the marvellous celerity of grass, it will already be stippled with fresh green shoots. Once the sheep are unpenned they'll put a stop to this... at least to outward appearance, so swiftly do they nip off the new growth. (In actual fact the herbage will go on putting out new growth whether the sheep are there or not.)

The line indentations reflect the rhyme-scheme, but not exactly, because line 1 rhymes with the shortened line 6 -- the least indented line and the most indented line. These important lines are somewhat separate from the rest of the stanza, which otherwise consists of two quatrains, thus:

a bcbc a deed

The music of this beautiful stanza form has three points of special distinction. 1. The first three lines, none of which rhymes with the others; the first answering rhyme is delayed until the fourth line. 2. The sixth line, with only three stresses, which stops the flow of pentameters. 3. The final quatrain with its inverted answering rhymes, which means that the eighth and ninth lines rhyme with each other (the only adjacent pair in the stanza) -- but the adjacent rhyme, falling here, isn't clinching, since we know that one further line remains to be uttered. (Browning invented a hundred different stanza forms, but never one with this kind of beauty and intelligence.)

In this first stanza, as in nine of the others, the first line is complete in itself and ends with a stop. But the fifteen other stanzas try other things, allowing the first line to be mistaken for the beginning of a quatrain, and for the real first line (i.e. line 2) to seem like a second line. Arnold tries every kind of counterpoint to his metre. For instance, the sentence runs on from St 6 into 7 and from St 24 into 25, but the effect is very different in each. The continuation of 6 ends in the detachable first line of 7, as we might have anticipated. 7.2 is a major new beginning - a prose writer would start a new paragraph. The continuation of 24 likewise takes us to 25.1, but it turns out that this time the crossing sentence is a parenthesis, so 25.2 actually resumes the narrative from 24.9 .

The rhyme showers/towers in St 3 is a prelude to powers/ours in St 17 and its reiteration in St 23 : the latter rhyme encapsulating the intellectual centre of the poem. (Does the S-G in any sense retain "powers", did he ever have them, or did he sacrifice their possibility for a fruitless and perverse pursuit? Isn't it truer to admit that power is "ours", though it wastes and shames us?)

*

St1-3 The poet in the field.
St 4-5 The story of the scholar-gipsy
St 6 Sightings
St 7 The poet wondering
St 8 Imagined sightings - summer night
St 9 Imagined sightings - spring evening
St 10 Imagined sightings - summer day
St 11 Imagined sightings - late summer; spring
St 12 Imagined sightings - autumn
St 13 Imagined sightings - the poet sees the S-G in winter
St 14 "But what -- I dream ! Two hundred years are flown..."
St 15-18 But the S-G hasn't lived like us and doesn't waste away like us
St 19 Our "dying spark of hope"
St 20 ...contrasted with the S-G's eternal hope
St 21-23 Apostrophe to the S-G: "Fly hence, our contact fear"
St 24-25 The Tyrian trader fleeing the new Grecian masters of the waves and making a journey to the far west.

*

The "abandon'd lasher" above Godstow Bridge (St. 10). A lasher is "the slack water collected above the weir in a river".

My attempt to write "The Scholar Gipsy" all over again:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/07/poem-swindon-february-2019.html