The Scholars - Analysis

A wish to escape into a lighter moral world

The poem reads like a spell of self-removal: the speaker wants to leave the ordinary world’s rules behind and arrive somewhere older, freer, and almost mythic. Even the opening desire—Would I could cast a sad on the water—sounds like an incantation, a longing spoken aloud to make it real. That water is not just scenery; it is a passageway, a place Where many a king has gone and many a king’s daughter, suggesting a legendary route into an otherworld. The central claim of the poem is bluntly anti-solemn: the best life is one where love stays changeable and the social rituals around permanence—especially religious marriage—look not noble but laughable.

The shore of pipes and dancing: love as a moving target

When the speaker imagines landing among comely trees and the lawn, the place is defined by music and motion: playing upon pipes and the dancing. In that setting, the speaker learns (as if it were local wisdom) that the best thing is to change my loves while dancing. Love here is not a vow but a rhythm—something that can shift mid-step without shame. The transactional line pay but a kiss for a kiss is deliberately small-scale: affection is immediate, equal, and fleeting, not turned into lifelong debt. The tone in this first movement is buoyant, even mischievous, as if the speaker is relieved to imagine a world that doesn’t demand moral heaviness from desire.

The hare’s collar-bone: a different kind of lens

The poem’s turn arrives with a strange object found by the edge of that water: The collar-bone of a hare, Worn thin by constant lapping. This tiny bone, shaped by erosion, becomes a tool the speaker alters—pierce it through with a gimlet—and then uses to stare at the world. The fantasy shifts from pastoral pleasure to a sharper, almost ritual act. The bone feels like an amulet or a crude eyepiece: something taken from a vulnerable animal and turned into a way of seeing. If the dancing shore offered permission, the hare-bone offers distance, a cold clarity—an object that makes it easier to judge the human world from across the water.

Marriage in churches: the poem’s target and its bitterness

What the speaker sees through that bone is the old bitter world—specifically, a world where they marry in churches. The repetition of that phrase tightens the poem’s criticism: marriage isn’t presented as private love but as a public institution, sanctified and policed. From the far side of the untroubled water, the speaker chooses laughter—laugh over the people who marry—yet the laughter is not purely carefree. The speaker has already named the world bitter; the mockery feels like a defensive joy, as if the only way to stay light is to ridicule what tries to bind. The tension is vivid: the speaker longs for freedom and play, but the emotion driving that longing is partly resentment, a need to hurt back at the seriousness that hurt first.

Untroubled water, troubled speaker

The water itself becomes a moral boundary. On one side, there is music, dance, and the easy economy of a kiss. On the other, there are churches and permanence. Yet the speaker’s mind doesn’t stay entirely in the carefree realm; it keeps returning to the human world to condemn it. That’s why the final image is so piercing: the speaker laughs Through the white thin bone. The bone is both a filter and a wound—white, thin, drilled through—suggesting that this freedom is purchased with a kind of hardness. The place of dancing is imagined as pure, but the speaker’s gaze is sharpened by bitterness, implying that the dream of liberty may be inseparable from anger at what must be escaped.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the speaker truly believes the best thing is to change loves while dancing, why the need for a pierced bone and a laugh aimed at others? The poem hints that the speaker’s ideal world isn’t just an alternative; it is a refuge built in opposition to churches, and therefore never fully free of them. Even on the far shore, the old world is still close enough to mock, still visible through the little drilled relic of a hare.