Matthew Arnold, poet, critic, and by profession a school inspector, was embedded in the world of Victorian academic tradition. His verse and essays display fears that the stability of traditional ways was under threat from the uncertainty of modernity.
In this poem, Arnold tells the story of an Oxford student who abandons academic life to join a band of gypsies. He learns their mysterious, almost magical, and clearly unacademic knowledge and devotes himself to a lifelong quest for direct perception of truth. Unlike the people with whom the poet is surrounded, he never becomes distracted or challenged by corrosive doubt or concern about the trivialities of suburban life.
