  The interaction of the partonic fluctuation of the virtual photon in deep
inelastic scattering with soft color fields describing the hadron is treated in
an eikonal approximation. It is known that, in this approach, the small-x limit
of the leading-order gluon distribution xg(x,Q^2) is a constant characterizing
the averaged local field strength in the target. Matching the next-to-leading
order calculation in this semiclassical framework with the one-loop parton
model result, we obtain the next-to-leading order contribution to xg(x,Q^2). It
shows a ln(1/x) enhancement at small x and is sensitive to the large distance
structure of the target. The final expression is a simple integral over
non-Abelian eikonal factors measuring the target color field. We derive a
quantitative relation between the short-distance cutoff of this integral and
the scale of the gluon distribution function in the MS-bar scheme. Our
calculation demonstrates that higher order contributions can be systematically
included in the semiclassical approach.
