The Oxford countryside is not only important to the speaker, but to Arnold as well. Arnold, like the scholar in the poem, felt himself torn between being a poet and maintaining a middle-class life style. Arnold turns to the pastoral to help him work through this complication.

Other examples of pastoral imagery occur in the seventh stanza, where Arnold invokes the image of boys at work in the wheat fields, the grass meadows, the sunshine, and the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills. Also, in the ninth stanza, the speaker tells of the maidens who complete the May dance around the elm, which is a reference to the pagan fertility ritual. It is also important to note the change in tone, beginning in stanza 15. Here, the speaker realizes that although Glanvil’s story of the scholar is over 200 years old, the scholar’s spirit and imagination are still alive. The speaker spends the remaining stanzas of the poem contrasting the life of the living scholar to those of ordinary mortals. This is notable in stanza 21 as the speaker expresses the living scholar in terms of moonlight, flowers and dew.

"The Scholar-Gypsy" begins with the speaker looking down over the city of Oxford from a quiet place in the surrounding countryside and reading from a seventeenth-century book by the scholar, Joseph Glanvill. The book in question is primarily an attack on academic dogmatism but contains a story about another Oxford scholar who left the university to travel the world as a gypsy. Arnold describes various characteristics of the scholar, beginning with his poverty. He then says that the scholar had great abilities ("pregnant parts") and a "quick inventive brain," but these qualities had not helped him to gain preferment or promotion within the university. Having grown tired of waiting, he "went to learn the gypsy-lore."

It is striking that even when Arnold refers to the scholar leaving his friends and occupation to join the gypsies, he describes him as "learning lore," viewing his new status and occupation in scholarly terms. When other scholars meet him by chance, he tells them that the gypsies have secrets and powers over the "working of men's brains" which he intends to discover and reveal to the world. This is why he is not a scholar who becomes a gypsy but a scholar-gypsy, maintaining his thirst for knowledge.

The scholar-gypsy has joined a band of gypsies but he appears in the poem as a solitary, elusive figure with "dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air." His clothes are those of a gypsy, but he retains the manner and attitude of a scholar. Now that Arnold is writing, two centuries after Glanvill, the figure of the scholar-gypsy has passed entirely into legend, but Arnold deliberately blurs the distinction between past and present, making his subject an archetypal figure of the shy, retiring, pensive scholar who was always semi-legendary and symbolic in his retreat from the formal, communal aspects of academic life.