The Gypsies (poem) - Analysis

Analysis

The poem addresses and interrogates the concept of the noble savage, an idea which had gained popular currency in the Romantic Age which held that those people who live further from "civilization" live "in harmony with nature and a more simple, childlike and blessed life" than the alienated and unhappy people in European cities. Aleko's failure to integrate with the gypsies and his continued insistence on the moral standards of the city in the gypsy encampment challenge the notion that happiness can be found by reverting to nature. The poem closes with a clear attack on the idea of the noble savage: "But even among you, poor sons of nature, there is no happiness! Tormenting dreams live below your bedraggled tents". (ll.562–565)

The Gypsies is the last of Pushkin's "Southern Poems", and is usually considered to be the most mature and sophisticated of these works. The "Southern Poems" are indebted to Byron: they use exotic and orientalized settings, rapid transitions, and chart sexual and military conquest. However, critics agree that The Gypsies, while inheriting much from the Byronic tradition, also strives to move away from it. Michael Wachtel argues that "the grim, fatalistic acceptance of life as a tragedy and of individual experience as endless repetition brings the work closer to Antiquity than to Byron". Antony Wood suggests that The Gypsies is a parody of both Rousseau's Noble Savage idea and Byron's verse tales, pointing out that "Aleko, pursuing the ideal of the Noble Savage, himself comes to present the spectacle of an ignoble citizen." John Bayley argues that The Gypsies "shows the problem of a poet as naturally classical as Pushkin in an epoch fashionably and self-consciously romantic."