The Scholar-Gipsy Comments

Dear Mr. Fraser, Before you criticise Arnold, should you not be able to tell Wordsworth from Tennyson?

It is a terrible shame that this very fine poem loses its way in the last 2 stanzas and strays from a wonderful theme - the world is too much with us, getting and spending* - into an extended and unfixed metaphor. There is a pre-Raphaelite quality about much of the description of the English countryside and while what the 'Scholar Gypsy' actually believed in is left purposefully vague, there is an emblematic quality about his presence which like the best romantic poetry leaves us with a deep sense of longing for the unrealizable. * Tennyson.