In the brief halcyon moment before the advent of Robert Burns and his wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie, James Thomson was the Scots poet of the eighteenth century.
For better or worse, we’re far likelier to know the chorus to “Rule Britannia” (which appeared as Poem of the Day this time last year) than we are to know its author’s name. Rather like the verses in that song, which hardly anyone knows the words to, James Thomson (1700–1748) has faded in the collective Anglophone memory to a sort of human mumble between shouted rounds of the famous refrain.
Yet in his day, that brief halcyon moment before the advent of Robert Burns and his wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie, Thomson was the Scots poet of the eighteenth century. His long four-part poem, “The Seasons,” from which today’s Poem of the Day is excerpted, was an enduring best-seller, with one of its editions gorgeously illustrated by Joshua Reynolds. The poem sold so well, in fact, that after Thomson’s death, its success gave rise to a dispute over the publishing rights and, in 1774, a ruling in the House of Lords declared statutory limits to copyright — which is why the poetry editors of the New York Sun can commemorate Thomson’s birthday by reprinting this section of his bestselling publication.
Like all of “The Seasons,” this relatively short excerpt demonstrates both Thomson’s facility with blank verse and his dramatist’s sense of a landscape. The poem unrolls like a stage setting moved into place, its actors taking their positions. It’s intensely visual, but visual in the way that drama, a kinetic art, is visual: its initial composition continually generating new compositions as its elements shift and change. Though no humans are present in this landscape, other than the speaker who narrates it, everything about it is infused with human feeling and consciousness. Though the speaker, like the author himself, remains offstage and anonymous, still he is present in everything he sees.
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