ABSTRACT
Thomson’s The Seasons is the greatest poem of natural description of the eighteenth century. Despite its indebtedness to Virgil and to Milton, the poem was celebrated by contemporary readers for its newness, a newness predicated not only on Thomson’s skill at descriptions of the natural world but also on his emphasis on emotion, many claiming to hear the poet in the verse. Yet Thomson the speaker is curiously elusive in this poem, his identification and the source of his poetic enthusiasm not easily ascertained. Though he acclaims the senses—particularly vision—as a way of divining God’s might, the speaker of Thomson’s poem is curiously incorporeal, suggesting the poet’s equivocal attitude towards embodied experience. Two types of imaginative engagement—mimetic (descriptive) and daemonic (analogical)—operate at cross-purposes in this poem, suggesting the limits of sensory perception in contacting the divine. The divergent currents of empirical description, analogy, pictorialism, and enthusiasm are particularly noticeable in a passage from Summer, here examined in some detail.
