The Validity of the Vision: The Scholar’s “Fight to Find the Lost Element”

In the context of Anorld’s poetic landscape, the “forest glade” is gone and the “glimmering sea is far beyond the reach of people who are wandering in the “darkling plain” where the genuine self is buried. The inability to find the genuine self, brought about by loss of hope, made the inhabitants of the “burning plain” continue their oscillations between the frustrating world and what they unconsciously felt to be its essential existence. It is actually because of this lack of courage that Empedocles suspends his own life. The inhabitants of the “burning desert” wait passively, and the culture simultaneously wait for the light they are shown as awaiting some revolution, but they are in a mood of “not being” or in a continual disappointment, without specific purpose. The aim of this essay is to show the changes in the passive, meditative mood of Arnold’s characters who begin the active life of the quest to find the genuine self. This quest begins with the story of “The Scholar Gipsy”.