A number of critics have sought to teach us how to read The Seasons, but their efforts still meet the determined resistance of such careful readers as F. R. Leavis and Reuben A. Brower. In Revaluation F. R. Leavis wrote: 'when we think of Johnson and Crabbe, when we recall any example of a poetry bearing a serious relation to the life of its time, then Gray, Thomson, Dyer, Akenside, Shenstone and the rest clearly belong to a by-line. It is literary and conventional in the worst sense of those terms.' And there is a more recent attack on the artistry of The Seasons [in 'Form and Defect of Form in Eighteenth Century Poetry: A Memorandum,' College English 29 (April 1968)] by Reuben A. Brower, who like another critic who guarded our tender sensibilities from Milton, warns against a Thomson revival on the grounds that Thomson lacks a 'unifying vision active in the separate descriptions.'

When such warnings are issued, it is necessary not to heed them, but to test them. Now is the time to examine the poetry of The Seasons not only because we have been warned not to do so, but because the poem obviously possesses sufficient 'life' to merit attention and attack. Perhaps, then, a study of the poem ought to begin by answering the assertion that it bears no 'serious relation to the life of its time.'

First and foremost, The Seasons is an Augustan poem, sharing with the major poetry of the period an awareness of the valued past, the corruption of this past in the present, the limited nature of human life, and the faith that a better life exists beyond 'this dark State.' When a recent critic contrasts the Augustan 'humanist' satiric tradition which 'is convinced that human nature, for all its potential dignity, is irremediably flawed and corrupt at the core' with the nonsatiric which 'tends to draw its real strength from the new industrial and commercial evidence of the validity of the idea of progress,' he is perpetuating a misinterpretation that even a perfunctory reading of The Seasons refutes.

Not only does Thomson propound the 'humanist' view of the limitation of man, but he sees man surrounded and often overwhelmed by natural forces. If in Spring God smiles upon man and brings him into a Golden Age. He also ceases to smile and brings destruction upon this peaceful haven. Thomson's poem is identified with the life of its time by revealing that the natural environment no less than human environment possesses beauty, awe as well as destructive powers. For if man can control the garden, he cannot control the storm, if he can plant in spring, he cannot be sure that he will be able to reap in autumn. Thomson's poem reveals an awareness of simultaneous and often contradictory actions in space, of joy in one place and sadness in another. It urges upon the reader the need to understand the environment by plunging into it not merely by seeing, but by tasting, smelling, hearing and touching it.

Thomson accepts the constant change governing his world, and this is why the turning of the seasons is the professed subject of the poem. By definition the seasons are cyclical, not progressive, and although chronologically seeds grow, men grow and states grow, they also decline. Only in heaven, where the good arrive, can inevitable progress be found. For the rest, British commerce may thrive while British culture declines, primitive people may exist in Africa while a civilized society exists in Britain. Thomson neither proposes nor defends 'the validity of the idea of progress.'

Thomson recognized the fragmentariness of man's experience, knowledge and happiness. He wrote of moments of harmony and of a limited ideal in nature and in man's rural retreats from nature, harmonious moments that provided a union with the past or a hopeful prospect for infinity. But such moments and places were necessary relief from the anxiety and uneasiness of actual human experience. The model people and places are necessary in The Seasons because they affirm the possibility of temporary relief from anxieties and disappointments and the hope of a future life. In the inevitable turning of time and fortune all retreats have to be abandoned. As Thomson wrote to Elizabeth Young upon the death of her sister, 'true Happiness is not the Growth of this mortal Soil, but of those blessed regions where she is now.'

The Seasons, with its awareness of limitations and change, urges upon man a participation in the environment, an awareness of it that provides unexpected delights together with expected sadness, destruction and the need to trust in God. And it does so by developing techniques for revealing the past in the present, the individual in the general the sadness in the joy. Brower's reference to 'separate descriptions' assumes, if I interpret it correctly, that the descriptions have no 'vital poetic connection' with other passages, but at least one modern critic claims to have found such connection. [In The Poetry of Vision (1967)] Patricia M. Spacks points out that 'Even the passages of" The Seasons most famed as descriptive set-pieces reveal the same preoccupation [as the nondescriptive passages] with emotional and intellectual significance rather than merely appearance.' The 'unifying vision' is that God's love and wisdom, only fragmentarily perceptible in the beautiful and dangerous aspects of man and nature, will become fully perceptible in a future world. Thomson's 'vision' evokes sentiments of beauty, sublimity, benevolence, fear and anxiety so that the reader may be led to believe in, to love, to trust, and to fear God's power.

This vision controls the descriptions as it does every aspect of the poem. It can be discovered in the overall unity where what is dominant in one season is converted into a subordinate role in another. The idea of love in Spring; for example, is subordinated to that of light and power in Summer; and this power is subordinated to the tempered atmosphere, the mists and declining sun of Autumn. The seasons follow a cyclical rhythm: gentle Spring, potent Summer, declining Autumn, destructive Winter. And yet each of these seasons contains, though it subordinates, opposing forces, and all are governed by the secret-working hand of God. Thus, though each season is rhythmically, associatively, and thematically connected with the preceding and following, the whole reveals the inevitable fragmentation of man's knowledge of the world. Each season is intertwined with a natural element and a human responsiveness so that as the earth opens, love flowers. And the fire of the sun brings enlightenment and oppressiveness followed by Autumn harvests which are like life-giving or saddening waters. The Winter tempests with their invigorating as well as destructive powers close the cycle in which Spring seeds lie dormant.

The sources and models for The Seasons are Job, the Georgics, De Rerum Natura, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Paradise Lost, and these do not lead to a new genre called 'descriptive poems.' Rather, The Seasons is a religious didactic poem, and its 'unifying vision' appears in the manner in which it joins eulogies, elegies, narratives, prospect views, historical catalogs, hymns, etc. Even if these are at times artistically ineffective, the point is that they are subsumed under a conception in which they are associately clustered to indicate the limited feature of each season. Thus even if, when removed as set-pieces, some parts are organic in themselves, their place in each season is inorganic or associative, so that organicism becomes merely another type of fragment.

The interpretation of a world where man and nature become part of a family of which God is the Father in no way implies that they uniformly reflect each other. Most men are dominated by selfish rather than benevolent desires and there are in nature 'vindictive' and 'jealous' forces; although love and benevolence are desirable, man and nature only occasionally achieve harmony. If, as a sympathetic critic of The Seasons writes, Thomson's 'internal moral world and the external world were intended to be in complete harmony,' then in Thomson's world such completeness is impossible, and his 'intention' unfulfilled. The realms of man and nature sometimes touch and sometimes clash, sometimes one forms an ironic or sentimental commentary upon the other, but the underlying conception is that neither one is complete nor are they together an illustration of the meaning of the world. They may create momentary harmonies or disharmonies, but they make clear that only God can explain the way of His wisdom and love.

Thomson adjusted contemporary practices to his own purposes and fashioned a language for his encompassing vision. He found continuities from the past in the present, different perspectives of the same or similar events, value and impressiveness in the objects and actions of nature. His adaptations included a private use of Latinate terms, the mixing of present with past participles, the introduction of scientific terms in religious passages, the use of general terms with specific implications. Thus the language of the poem reflected the 'vision' since terms possessed different perspectives, and at different times the same word occurs in varied, even contrary contexts.

Thomson's innovations are particularly noticeable in his use of periphrasis. This image was what critics referred to when they attacked the literariness or conventionality of his poetry. R. D. Havens in 1922 declared that Thomson 'delighted in unnatural and inflated circumlocutions, like "the household feathery people" (hens), "the copious fry" or "the finny race" or "the glittering finny swarms".' Such objections have been answered extensively, and John Butt's comments [as stated in The Augustan Age (1950)] can stand for numerous others: 'Thomson's Latinisms came naturally to a lowland Scot writing Southern English, and his periphrases were used not to escape vulgarity, but precisely and evocatively.' Thomson's precision, achieved by converting periphrasis to a combination of personification and scientific classification, interpreted nature accurately, scientifically and humanistically in order to illustrate the relation between the realms of man and animal.

Thomson's general terms, decried as turgid and repetitive, function not as flabby general terms, but as forms of metonymy in which the whole stands for a part and in different contexts for different parts, so that the fragmentation of the world is always conceived as a class or ideal term comprehending a variety of individual members. In connecting pastoral conventions to a comic conception of contemporary rural life, he developed a linguistic procedure (I have called it 'illusive allusion') in which he playfully ridiculed the convention and parodied its applicability to the present. He was not unwilling to burlesque the convention of the hunting scene or to mock the convention of pastoral love. Since he sought a perspectival interpretation of human experience as well as of art, he could include two versions of the same genre or convention with contrasting implications.

But varied meanings of the same word or convention in no way led Thomson to relativism, for he accepted the belief in God's wisdom and love. He accepted some aspects of literary continuity by incorporating Biblical, classical and Miltonic allusions into his vision. These became a basis for his interpretation of the simultaneity of past and present. And the virtues of the heroic, political, and literary heroes of the past find a place in his catalogs because they represent values that the virtuous moderns also possess. Despite changing particulars, there were virtues that endured exactly as there were evils that endured. When [in Religious Trends in English Poetry (1939)] Hoxie N. Fairchild writes that in The Seasons God is social and smiling, that 'All of Him has faded away except the cosmic grin,' he completely ignores Thomson's repeated assertions of human pain and suffering: 'the thousand nameless Ills, / That one incessant Struggle render Life, / One Scene of Toil, of Suffering, and of Fate' (Winter, 349-51).

Thomson converts conventional figures such as repetition or metaphor to his own vision of a brilliant and dangerous spatial world in change. Thus repetition as epizeuxis defines intensity by spatial movement or extent. His use of metaphor that shifts between natural description and personification relates felt particularity to a parallel human order and reaffirms the human feeling necessary to the interpretation and appreciation of nature. Another aspect of Thomson's use of metaphor contrasts man's imperfection with God's perfection by illustrating the dependence of man's imagination upon God's creativity. The same term is, in one instance, literal, and, in another, metaphoric. The deluge is an actual deluge in one season, a deluge of light or earth in another. The elements themselves are converted into aspects of each other, and the implications of this procedure are both scientific and religious. There is nothing that man can imagine or discover which God has not already created in the universe. Man can occasionally discover what he never knew before, but it was always there, and it supports the interpretation of man's knowledge as fragmentary and God's power as omnipresent.

In this world in which nature is often puzzling, anxiety is no stranger to man. Geoffrey Tillotson notes that 'anxious was a favourite Augustan epithet,' and Thomson's poem adjusts a common term and idea to his own ends. The wandering narrator observes uncertainty, harmony and disharmony. But these lead him to a recognition of his own limitations. Critics have objected that Thomson often shifts from one place to another without explanation, what Reuben A. Brower calls 'the bald lack of transitions,' yet this practice is consistent with his vision. Logical and reasonable explanations will not do; good men die and evil ones live on, and no rationalizing will explain God's wisdom. Time and again the ironic silence indicates the need for faith and the failure of reason to understand God's ways. Indeed, when the individual feels most at one with God, silence is the only answer, and the last line of the 'Hymn' is, 'Come then, expressive Silence, muse his Praise.'

With the varied uses of genres and figures, Thomson necessarily combined poetic tones appropriate to them. In his depiction of rural workers his language is occasionally sensual, aware of the pleasure in sexual play and healthy sexual appetites. To talk of Thomson's bad taste is to disregard the fact that in the poem sexual pleasures are a genuine part of the transient joys of rural man. Thomson had a fine sense of playing off one style against another to illustrate the unexpected collocation of joy and suffering, and his letters reveal that the poetry expressed deeprooted human values, pertinent to his comic and ironic as well as to his serious tones.

Throughout the poem Thomson attacks courtiers and aristocrats and all others who in pride and viciousness pursue their selfish interests. These Thomson sees as never entering the kingdom of heaven, but his sympathy for the poor and the weak does not lead him to a revolutionary position. He opposes the vicious jailers, the mean squires, the cruel bird-killers, but he adheres to a conventional class structure. His view of change operates within the given natural and institutional boundaries.

The estates with their prospects constitute a middle place between earth and heaven from which one can view infinity. Thomson establishes a typical eighteenth-century cluster of peace, prosperity, patriotism, and plenty, and the estates are the sources of wealth and the basis for Britain's power, This means that the poem is often fulsome in its praise of aristocrats; often the dreariest passages are those in which the ideals of the squirearchy are identified with those of the Horatian contented man, and complacence is substituted for composure.

In The Seasons Thomson undertook a series of experiments that led him to new uses of imagery, to trials in word combinations, to incorporation of scientific with classical and Biblical language in order to express his poetic vision of the world. The traditions of word order, sentence structure, diction and subject that he inherited he sought to use for his own new purposes. He developed techniques of recurrence to express subtle temporal and spatial changes; he used the inherited figures of paradox and irony to express scientific ideas in which minute space contained worlds and silence roared. Within the view of successive space, he saw a constant shifting and interrelating of men and nature in which objects were transformed, as were the words that Thomson used to express them. His poem moved within a classical and religious tradition that was connected with an exhilarating sense of the present, scientifically and precisely felt. Thomson used nature to develop a 'new-creating Word' and 'a heightened Form.' The new word and form expressed, within a great tradition of English poetry, the fragmentary perception of the beauty, sublimity, benevolence and destruction that man experienced, but only God fully understood….

Thomson's great achievement [in The Seasons] is to have fashioned a conception which, by bringing nature to the forefront of his poem, became a new poetic way of defining human experience. Thomson was not the first nature poet to write in English, but he was the first to provide an effective idiom in which science, religion, natural description and classical allusion blended to describe the glory, baseness and uncertainty of man's earthly environment, holding forth the hope of heavenly love and wisdom.

Thomson did not deny the actuality of wickedness, the hunter-killers, the wealthy aristocrats disregarding human need and squandering their wealth, the religious exploiters and the brutal executors of injustice. Nor did he deny that aspects of nature seemed, at times, jealous and vindictive, destroying good men and sparing the wicked. But these aspects existed simultaneously with others, with the comic, exhilarating, joyful transformations. This double view he accepted, but he did not accept any simple moral arithmetic in nature and he did not believe that virtue or benevolence was directly rewarded on earth.

Thomson did not have these considerations in view when he composed Winter in 1726, and the final work is all the more impressive if one attends to its modest inception. In a famous letter to William Cranstoun [c. October 1, 1725] Thomson wrote: 'Nature delights me in every form, I am just now painting her in her most lugubrious dress; for my own amusement, describing winter as it presents it self.' And in the same letter he explained the source of Winter: 'Mr. Rickelton's poem on winter, which I still have, first put the design into my head.' When he published his 'Preface' in the second edition of Winter (1726), he announced his intent of composing poems on the other seasons, but he was now cognizant that he was working on a 'great' subject formerly treated by the 'best' poets.

The seasons provided Thomson with a naturalistic basis for change which, by its cyclical pattern, permitted limited progression in any one season while relating the whole to God's power. But the cycle of the seasons is not the circle of perfection, and in the poem the cyclical repetition, like the confrontation of opposites, does not lead to a whole. It leads to a temporary completion that introduces a new beginning. Scientifically, change was explained by the traditional assumptions of the transformability of the four elements, but Thomson mixes this view with a description of observed natural changes. The speaker absorbs the scientific explanation by mixing natural description with personification, by using the same term in a literal and metaphoric sense. A knowledge of science can assist man in understanding nature, but such knowledge cannot provide answers to ultimate questions.

Pope and Swift saw much of the present as a rejection of the humanistic views of the past, but Thomson, while sharing many of these objections, found approximations of the ideal past in the society of the present. This recognition was in no sense a support of all current institutions, but neither he nor the satirists were revolutionaries. Change came by degrees, and the history of states was the history of rising and falling empires, and only God's wisdom could explain the ultimate reasons for such change.

For us, Thomson's patriotism and his flattery of his aristocratic friends and patrons is reprehensible. Yet it is consistent with his interpretation of the state as a responsible institution in the family of nations. Britain, by creating necessary commerce and putting down disorderly nations, becomes the father of an international family, even though in its own local family there are proud, vicious and unruly members. Since Britain is the poet's country, set in the temperate zone, the mean between extremes, it possesses the features of a model.

Thomson's own move from Scotland to London was a personal instance of the more general movement taking place in his society. His poetry describes commercial expansion, the movements of geographical exploration and inquiry. Such movement could be harmonious or disharmonious, but it explains why a rural estate could be interpreted as a retreat that was not an escape but a model. In so far as man sought to incorporate into his estate a sense of the past with a prospect for the future, he rested content within his limited world. It was Thomson's conception that the world could not and should not remain confined within man's private domain. His poem, therefore, reveals the need to explore, to inquire, to leave the comfortable shelter. Man had to experience the nature that God created, though it might merely lead him back to the temperate zone.

Marshall McLuhan has suggested [in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)] that 'landscape offered a broader and less exacting course for those who were preoccupied with the new psychological interests on the one hand and with the means of evading the new insistence on non-metaphorical and mathematical statement as the mode of poetry, on the other hand.' But this interpretation, with its assumption that Pope's poetry was a poetry of statement and its claim that 'landscape' poetry provided an alternative to it, merely perpetuates fictions about Pope's and Thomson's poetry. Pope's poetry was no more a poetry of statement than Thomson's was anti-mathematical. Nor was it a less exacting course….

Whatever his conscious sources were in 1726, the poem gradually became a palimpsest, the ends of which were to evoke the varied sentiments towards nature, man and God and to urge that as a consequence of man's fragmentary understanding the joy, beauty, pain and puzzle of the world demanded endurance and belief.

The poem, with its cyclical pattern and progressive moments, with religious exclamations preceded and followed by empirical description, deliberately avoided rational connections. It was composed of diverse fragments, the purpose of which was to establish links and contrasts among nature, animals, man and God. Thus Thomson created a world of simultaneous occurrences in space, but these only occasionally led to harmonious blending. The world being perceivable only in fragments, it was inevitable that no view of the whole could exist without an act of belief.

In so far as the past existed in the present, it could be found in an ideal retreat, in those isolated moments in man's life when the virtues of the past, the deeds of virtuous men and the writings of genius lived for those who appreciated them and sought to bring their values into the living present. For it is in the living, changing, joyous and uneasy present that Thomson's poem has its vitality.

There is no single narrative development, but there are varied narratives and scenes of 'sad Presage.' There is no single 'nature,' but there are varied interpretations of nature at different places and times. Yet all of these are controlled by a concept of natural change governed by a God who for all His variations is timeless and omnipresent. In the organization of The Seasons even organically unified parts are merely another aspect of fragmentation, held together by the principles of repetition and transformation.

The unifying imagery in each season and the stylistic and thematic unity of the whole prevent the poem from collapsing into a heap of fragments. Not only is there an underlying rhythm in the succession of the seasons and an order of elements, but within each season the fragments are juxtaposed to blend or clash. These reveal, in the very order of the seasons, a world in which man, while rejoicing in and competing with nature, is surrounded and often engulfed by it. Man may be superior to the animals in consciousness, but he can be their prey, as they can be his. It is possible to establish coherence and organic interrelatedness in some areas of Thomson's world, but the world as a whole remains a maze, the plan of which is hidden from mortal eye. It is, however, the poet's privilege, because of the eminences on which he stands (emblematic of his philosophical and spiritual elevation), occasionally to see and to speak with prophetic, with more than mortal, vision.

The repetitive themes, images, words become a means for interconnecting the whole. Thomson's unifying procedure makes demands upon the reader to construct distinctions within the poem, a demand that has all too often been rejected. It is now a commonplace that terms like 'wit' and 'nature' carry multiple meanings in the Essay on Criticism or the Essay on Man, and critics no longer deny to this repetition a valuable artistic function. Thomson's procedure is a variant of this Augustan practice, but he has not been granted the same consideration and understanding. Yet in The Seasons the development of varied and contrary contexts, the use of illusive allusion, the use of participles, of deliberately altered parts of speech, is Thomson's artistic signature. His general terms must be understood as incorporating many individual possibilities, exactly as God is to be apprehended in and through variations that are, nevertheless, one. This conception of general terms is inherent in the conception of Thomson's language. His terms are not mythopoeic, but rather inclusive terms for a varied group of references, since the same act or event can be interpreted from different perspectives. It is for this reason that metonymy is a frequent figure in the poem; in it, the whole represents a part, the general is used for the specific, the effect for the cause.

The other types of imagery in the poem—personification, periphrasis, metaphor, etc.—are all instances of Thomson's conversion of literary conventions to his own artistry. For these images, fluctuating as they do between the literal and the metaphoric, the allegorical and the natural, the human and the non-human, exemplify Thomson's world. In it the imaginative is interpreted by reference to the known. The natural environment becomes the basis for the magic changes and transformations that take place, and Thomson celebrates the beauty, sublimity, wonder and menace of the known world.

One aspect of nature can show cruelty or love to another—the sun to flowers, the breeze to the seeds, the fish to the flies—just as nature can show love or cruelty to man. There is no necessary harmony between nature and man or within nature. Moments of harmony exist, but in no particular instance can imperfect man presume to understand perfect God. The imagery of change that enacts this view is a Thomsonian innovation and neither Milton nor Wordsworth uses the conventions for such purposes.

The language of the poem is unmistakably directed toward expressing Thomson's thought and feeling. It is the result of his experience of the world, and the prose language of his letters and his 'Preface' find their way into his poetry in demonstration of the fact that his poetry springs from his view of the world. The language, indeed, provides a unifying force in the sense that, for all its variations of tone—burlesque, comic, eulogistic, elegiac, beautiful or sublime—it incorporates Biblical, classical and scientific meanings with current usage. To this extent illusive allusions, Latinate words, periphrases and personifications, participles and hyphenated terms belong to the procedure of making the past simultaneous with the present or adding present implications to past meanings and acts. Yet such words and procedure are selective, for not all fragments of the past function effectively.

The language and thought incorporate not only external traditions but personal feelings and events. The Latinate and scientific constructions serve to create an aesthetic distance between the narrator and his private feelings. Thomson's personal involvement in the poem is concealed by these techniques at the same time that they convey his views of human experience. Thus he can talk about sex while describing flowers or about his own feelings of the pain of love by describing the ideal. These techniques are methods to convert and conceal his private feelings though critics have naïvely assumed that his language was 'objective' rather than an artistic instrument for disguising but not disregarding the personal sources.

Thomson uses the third-person speaker so that the reader can place himself in the position of the speaker. When Thomson shifts to the first person or to the vocative, he does so to indicate that the speaker's private perspective is another instance of the general voice. In this, it becomes a model for responding to the environment and God. The different tones—the comic, burlesque, mock-heroic, elegiac, etc.—provide perspectives on the different classes and on the literary conventions appropriate to them. For the tones are referred to and tested by the naturalistic environment which, traditionally, they have allegorized and idealized. Thomson's poem may, therefore, be understood as seeking to fuse the allegorical with the natural and to use allusions to Virgil and the Bible to support his own vision of the world.

Thomson's defects are of two kinds: he is limited in his knowledge of man and in the range of his understanding of human behavior; and, within the range to which he confines himself, he sometimes uses techniques formalistically to conceal his inadequate grasp of a situation or to cajole the reader by flattery or sentimentality. The poem can become overly scientific and excessively formal or overly sentimental, the types of dangers that Thomson risks by using the mixed form and scientific or abstract terms. There is always the risk, too, that repetition will rub off the rough individual edges of a general term and make it vague and indefinite. Thomson tries to avoid succumbing to such faults by employing a fragmentary structure which prevents any readily accepted generalization, and in this he is overwhelmingly successful, even when he introduces scientific explanations and terminology.

Thomson related nature's transformations to the familial, commercial, political and social world of man. The unity, thought, diction, grammar of the poem offered an interpretation of Augustan society, that, for all its similarity to the views of Pope, presented a novel poetic vision. When Wordsworth came to write of nature in the Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude, he was writing of a different nature and a different world. Thomson's third-person speaker-poet, his interpolated narratives, his shuttling between description and metaphor, his preferred epithets and individual diction were not idiosyncrasies; they were related to a view of poetry that sought an idiom for the fragmentary, yet beautiful and aweful, firmament of space in which man and nature were subject to the transient moments of beauty, awe and destruction. For Thomson there was the need to collect as many fragmentary views as possible so that they became an ordered disorder. For Wordsworth the symbolic language envisioned a wholeness and a unity through the poet's consciousness, so that his fragments imply a whole. But Thomson's order demands of the reader a rejection of completion, a constant and unending discrimination of distinctions. He recognized then what we recognize now, that what man understands is only a perspective, and that although some of these may fortunately combine to give a momentary harmony, too much occurs that is inharmonious to permit a reasoned answer. Thomson saw and felt and knew a world for which he found a personal idiom and he believed unfailingly in another world that he neither saw nor knew. For both these worlds he created an artistic vision, and The Seasons is its unfolding.