Landscapes "Dynamically in Motion": Revisiting Issues of Structure and Agency in Thomson's The Seasons

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2005 by Kinsley, Zoë

The Seasons was first published in complete form in 1730.3 It was the most popular nature poem of the eighteenth century and took as its subject not a single view or prospect but a multitude of natural scenes. Thomson luxuriantly details the beauty of the natural world, yet, ultimately, he celebrates that world as the magnificent creation of God; nature is beautiful and various, yet it is also an awesome, powerful, and sometimes destructive force. While he honors man's relationship with nature, he also emphasizes his own humility. The poetry engages with nature indulgently, yet it consistently acknowledges man's limitations, both when faced with the force of nature and when trying to give it expression.

In The Seasons, Thomson negotiates the limitations of literary expression in order to adequately represent the natural world in his poetry. A major difficulty for writers of descriptive poems was that of organizing the objects of a landscape, all of which exist simultaneously and the order of which when described in poetry is necessarily arbitrary. This was, in fact, a criticism made by Samuel Johnson when discussing The Seasons in his Lives of the Poets: "The great defect of The Seasons is want of method; but for this I know not that there was any remedy. Of many appearances subsisting all at once, no rule can be given why one should be mentioned before another [. . .]" (299-300). The point Johnson makes is a crucial one. The argument, as summed up by Hutchings, is that "spatial simultaneity of objects in a landscape cannot be equated by words' sequential movement" (43). A central premise of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's treatise Laokoon, first published in 1766, was that it was this deficiency that distinguished poetry from pain ting as a mode of expression. The spatial arrangement of objects that exist simultaneously, and in juxtaposition, is the realm of the painter. The temporal succession of objects can only be adequately expressed through poetry. Painting is a static form that can define multiple objects that exist in juxtaposition and their relationship to each other, but it can only do so at one given moment in time. Poetry is a fluid form that expresses objects in succession and is, therefore, suited to temporal progression but can give no real sense of the simultaneity of the spatial relationship of those parts: "I maintain that succession of time is the department of the poet, as space is that of the painter" (Lessing 103).

In choosing images of motion to organize his landscape description, Thomson, however, manages to traverse that distinction between poetry and painting: he achieves both temporal succession and spatial arrangement. The river flowing through a landscape, the light of the sun's rays passing over a valley, the wind blowing the clouds across the sky: all of these are active movements through space and time that provide a definite sequence by which the objects of the landscape are encountered and can be described while retaining a sense of their physical place in that scene.