Study guide
The Seasons
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Overview
- Author
- James Thomson (1700–1748), born at Ednam in the Scottish Borders, a minister's son educated at Edinburgh, who moved to London in 1725
- Publication
- Winter (1726), Summer (1727), Spring (1728); Autumn, A Hymn and the first collected Seasons (1730)
- Revision
- Revised and greatly enlarged over sixteen years, above all in 1744, with a final text in 1746; Winter grew from just over 400 lines to 1,069
- Form
- Blank verse on the model of Milton's Paradise Lost, with a heavily Latinate diction
- Genre
- Descriptive-meditative poem in the georgic tradition of Virgil's Georgics, mixing description, science, moral reflection, narrative episodes and patriotic panegyric
- Parts
- Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter (in the collected order) and a closing Hymn of 118 lines
- Dedicatees
- Countess of Hertford (Spring), George Bubb Dodington (Summer), Arthur Onslow (Autumn), Sir Spencer Compton, later Earl of Wilmington (Winter)
- Famous episodes
- The rainbow and Newton's prism (Spring); Celadon and Amelia, Damon and Musidora (Summer); Palemon and Lavinia (Autumn); the shepherd lost in the snow (Winter)
- Text quoted
- A 1791 edition printing the final (1746) text, with some printer's errors; line references follow Sambrook's Oxford numbering where the count agrees
- Afterlife
- Among the most reprinted English poems for a century; quoted by Turner, set by Haydn in Die Jahreszeiten (1801), and a starting point for Romantic nature poetry
Context
James Thomson was born in 1700 at Ednam, near Kelso in the Scottish Borders, and grew up at Southdean, where his father was parish minister. He studied at Edinburgh University with the ministry in view, but he was already writing verse, and early in 1725, after his father's death, he sailed for London to make his way as a poet. He worked as a tutor, met the Scottish literary circle around David Mallet, and in March 1726 published Winter, a poem of just over four hundred lines. Its success was immediate, and within a few months a second edition appeared with a preface that called poetry back from trifles to the great subjects of nature and religion (Sambrook 1991) (Grant 1951).
The other seasons followed: Summer in 1727, Spring in 1728, and in 1730 a subscription quarto of The Seasons that added Autumn and the closing Hymn. In the same years Thomson wrote a poem on Newton's death (1727), the patriotic Britannia (1729) and the tragedy Sophonisba (1730). He travelled in France and Italy as tutor to Charles Talbot, wrote the long political poem Liberty (1735–36), and with Mallet the masque Alfred (1740), performed for Frederick, Prince of Wales, which contains the ode 'Rule, Britannia!' set by Thomas Arne. He died at Richmond in 1748, shortly after publishing The Castle of Indolence (Thomson 1986) (Sambrook 1991).
Thomson never stopped working on The Seasons. He revised it for the 1730 quarto, again for an edition of 1744 that added more than a thousand lines, and a last time in 1746. Passages were added on his friend and patron George Lyttelton, on his beloved Amanda (Elizabeth Young), on British worthies, on the torrid zone and the frozen north. The text printed on this site, from a 1791 edition, is in substance this final version, and it is the one most readers have known; James Sambrook's Oxford edition of 1981 prints the same text with the variants of every earlier state (Thomson 1981) (Cohen 1970).
The poem's form looks back to two models. Its blank verse, its inversions and its Latinate vocabulary come from Milton, whose Paradise Lost was the great English example of serious unrhymed verse. Its matter comes from Virgil's Georgics, a poem on farming that is also a poem on the state, the gods and the labour of human life; Thomson calls Virgil 'the rural Maro' and follows him in praising the plough, the harvest and the retired life. To these he added the new science: the poem is full of Newton's optics, of contemporary geography and natural history, and of the argument, made by writers such as John Ray and William Derham, that the order of nature proves the wisdom and goodness of its Creator (McKillop 1942) (Chalker 1969) (Nicolson 1946).
The Seasons became one of the most widely read poems in English. It was reprinted hundreds of times, illustrated, translated into the major European languages, and adapted by Gottfried van Swieten as the libretto of Haydn's oratorio Die Jahreszeiten (1801). Painters, above all J. M. W. Turner, attached Thomson's lines to their landscapes in exhibition catalogues. For Wordsworth it was the first poem since Paradise Lost to bring new images of external nature into English verse, even if, he thought, it was admired for the wrong reasons; and its mixture of description and reflection prepared the ground for Romantic nature poetry (Wordsworth 1974) (Terry 2000).
Plot overview
The Seasons has no plot in the ordinary sense. It follows the year from spring to winter, and each season is built from a sequence of descriptive scenes, moral reflections, short tales and addresses to patrons and friends. The speaker moves freely across space and time: from the English farm to the tropics or the Arctic, from the behaviour of birds to the history of nations, from the physics of light to the providence of God.
Spring traces the influence of the season on the vegetable world, on animals and on human beings, rising from the plough and the showers through the courtship of birds to human love, and ending in praise of happy marriage. Summer is shaped as a single long day, from dawn through the heat of noon to evening and night, with a long excursion to the torrid zone, a thunderstorm in which a young woman is killed, the bathing of Musidora, a prospect of the Thames valley and a panegyric on Britain and its great men.
Autumn celebrates the harvest and tells the tale of Palemon and Lavinia, a rural version of the story of Ruth and Boaz. It moves on to shooting and hunting, with a satire on fox-hunters, to orchards and the vintage, to fogs, the origins of rivers, the migration of birds and the melancholy of the declining year, and ends in Virgil's praise of the farmer's life and a prayer to be taught the laws of nature. Winter opens with storms, rain, wind and snow, tells of a shepherd who dies lost in a snowdrift, turns to the poor and the prisons, to evenings of study with the great men of antiquity, to the city and the frozen north, and ends with a vision of the last day.
A Hymn, added in 1730, gathers the four seasons into a single act of praise. It calls on the whole creation, from rivers and winds to the birds and the human choir, to sing the God who is present in all the changes of the year, and it ends with the poet lost in that God and falling into an 'expressive silence'.
Part by part
Part 1: Spring
1–1176
Summary
The poem calls Spring down from the clouds and addresses the Countess of Hertford. Winter withdraws to the north, and after some uncertain days of frost the husbandman drives his oxen to the plough. The poet recalls Virgil's farming poem, urges Britons to honour the plough, and imagines their soil becoming a granary for the world. He describes the warmth that wakes the seeds, the gentle showers, the evening after rain, and the rainbow that the boy runs to catch.
From vegetable life the poem turns to a Golden Age when men lived without flesh-eating and without passion, and to its loss; it then describes the angler, the profusion of flowers in the garden, and an invitation to Amanda. A long passage follows on the love of birds: their songs, courtship, nest-building and care of the young, the nightingale robbed of her brood, and the love-season of cattle, horses and sea creatures. The poet sees in all this the hand of the 'Smiling God'.
Finally the season is shown working on human beings. The love of nature rises into religious rapture, an address to Lyttelton describes him walking in Hagley Park and planning Britain's good, and the poem warns young lovers of the torments of jealous passion. It ends with a picture of wedded love, virtuous, domestic and rural, in which a couple grow old together and die in peace.
Analysis
Spring states the plan of the whole poem most clearly: a single power runs through the plant, the animal and the human mind, and the order in which Thomson treats them is a scale of being. The georgic opening is not decoration. By naming Virgil and praising the plough, Thomson claims for his poem the dignity of a national work, and the lines on Britain's soil feeding 'a world' already join farming to commerce and empire (Chalker 1969) (Goodman 2004).
The rainbow passage shows the poem's characteristic double vision. The 'sage-instructed eye' that knows Newton's account of refraction is set beside the boy who runs to catch the bright arch and sees it vanish. Thomson does not choose between them: science, for him, adds to wonder rather than dispelling it. Marjorie Hope Nicolson showed how deeply Newton's Opticks shaped the colour language of the poem, and Turner later attached this passage to one of his first exhibited watercolours (Nicolson 1946).
The passages on love show Thomson's debt to the moral philosophy of his day, especially Shaftesbury's idea of a benevolent social feeling rooted in nature. Animal love and human love are described as one process, but the poem is careful to separate innocent affection from jealous or sensual passion, and it closes on marriage as the human form of the harmony that the season expresses (McKillop 1942) (Spacks 1959).
COME, gentle Spring, æthereal Mildness, come; And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend!
An invocation in the Miltonic manner: the season is a person, the diction Latinate ('æthereal'), and the sentence holds its verb back to the end.
Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;
Nature itself performs Newton's experiment. The epithet 'awful' gives the scientist the reverence usually reserved for God.
Ye generous Britons, venerate the plough!
The georgic turned patriotic: farming is presented as the source of national strength and of a trade that will feed the world.
Part 2: Summer
1–1805
Summary
Summer arrives as the 'Child of the Sun', and the poet retreats into the shade of a wood to sing, addressing George Bubb Dodington. The season is followed through a single day. Dawn rises, the shepherd drives out his flock, and the poet hails the sun as the soul of the planetary system and the source of minerals, gems and life. Noon brings haymaking and sheep-shearing, insects swarming in the heat, cattle at the pool, and the poet's withdrawal into a grove, where he hears inspiring voices.
A long excursion carries the reader to the torrid zone: its fruits and great rivers, its wild beasts, its plagues and sandstorms, and the shark that follows the slave ship. Back in Britain a thunderstorm breaks; in the tale of Celadon and Amelia a lightning bolt kills the young woman in her lover's arms. After the storm the poet describes bathing, and tells how Damon sees Musidora bathing in a stream, leaves a note promising to guard her privacy, and receives her answer carved on a tree.
In the afternoon the poet walks with Amanda on Richmond Hill and looks over the Thames valley, which leads him into a panegyric on Britain: its soil, its liberty, its statesmen, philosophers and poets, and its beautiful women. Evening falls, glow-worms shine, a meteor and a comet cross the sky, and the poem ends with praise of philosophy, which rises from the study of nature to the moral world and the hope of a life beyond this one.
Analysis
Summer is the most expanded of the seasons. In 1727 it was a poem of moderate length; by 1744 Thomson had added the tropics, the Richmond prospect and much of the catalogue of British worthies, and the plan of a single day had to hold an encyclopaedia. Ralph Cohen's study of the revisions shows how such additions changed the poem's balance, adding geography and history to what had been mostly description and reflection (Cohen 1970).
The tropical excursion displays both the range and the contradictions of Thomson's imagination. Its scenes of fertile plenty sit beside scenes of horror, and the shark that feeds on the 'partners of that cruel trade' is one of the earliest condemnations of the slave trade in English poetry. Yet the same poem praises commerce and the British navy, and critics have read the passage as an uneasy acknowledgement of the costs of the empire it celebrates (Barrell 1983) (Fulford 1996).
The two love episodes are opposite in tone. Celadon and Amelia raise the problem of providence, since the virtuous are struck down as readily as the guilty, and the poem leaves the question unresolved. Musidora, by contrast, is an exercise in delicate erotic comedy, in which the speaker invites the reader to watch while praising the young man's restraint. Wordsworth's charge that Thomson's admirers read for the wrong reasons was often connected, by later readers, with the popularity of such set pieces (Wordsworth 1974) (Spacks 1959).
FROM brightening fields of ether fair disclos'd, Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes, In pride of Youth, and felt thro' Nature's depth:
Summer as a sun-god's son. The season is felt 'thro' Nature's depth', a phrase that joins physical heat with the poem's idea of a pervading power.
From his void embrace, Mysterious Heaven! that moment, to the ground A blacken'd corse, was struck the beauteous maid.
The climax of the Celadon and Amelia episode. Thomson's exclamation, 'Mysterious Heaven!', leaves the suffering of the innocent unexplained.
Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts, Inspiring vigor, Liberty abroad Walks, unconfin'd, even to thy farthest cotts, And scatters plenty with unsparing hand.
The prospect from Richmond Hill becomes a political vision: liberty and plenty spread from the centre to the remotest cottage.
Part 3: Autumn
1–1373
Summary
Autumn comes crowned with sickle and sheaf, and the poet addresses Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons, hoping to join patriotic with poetic fire. He praises Industry, which raised humanity from savagery to civil life, commerce and the arts, and then describes the harvest field: the reapers at dawn, the rural talk, the gleaners, and the duty of the rich to leave something for the poor.
This leads into the tale of Palemon and Lavinia. Lavinia, an orphaned girl of good family living in poverty with her widowed mother, comes to glean in the field of the rich and generous Palemon. He is struck by her beauty and modesty, learns that she is the daughter of his old benefactor Acasto, and marries her. A sudden storm that flattens the harvest follows, and then the season's sports: partridge-shooting, hare-hunting and the fox-hunt, ending in a mock-heroic feast where the hunters drink themselves under the table.
The poet moves to the nut-gathering, the orchards and the vintage, the autumn fogs, and a long scientific passage on the origin of springs and rivers. He describes the migration of birds, the flocks of the Scottish isles, and praises his native Scotland. Falling leaves bring on a philosophic melancholy and a meditation on Stowe and on patriots; the poem ends by praising the retired country life in Virgil's words, and with a prayer to Nature to reveal her laws.
Analysis
Autumn is the most openly georgic of the seasons. The praise of Industry, the harvest and the closing praise of rural life all rework passages of Virgil's Georgics, especially the second book's famous celebration of the farmer who would be fortunate if he knew his own happiness. But Thomson's farmers are seen at a picturesque distance. John Barrell has argued that eighteenth-century poetry and painting made rural labour visible only in forms that hid its hardship, and the cheerful reapers of Autumn are a leading example (Barrell 1980) (Low 1985).
Palemon and Lavinia shows Thomson's skill in the sentimental tale. It retells the Book of Ruth in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century sensibility, making benevolence and modest beauty the virtues that cross the boundary of class. The story confirms social order even as it softens it, since the generous landowner raises the poor girl to her proper station, which is in fact the station she was born to (Thomson 1981).
The hunting passages show the poem's moral range. Thomson attacks the cruelty of the chase with real feeling, then turns the fox-hunters' dinner into a burlesque in the manner of Pope. The closing prayer, in which the poet asks to understand the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms and the mind itself, sums up the poem's ambition to unite science, morality and devotion (McKillop 1942) (Cohen 1970).
Crown'd with the sickle, and the wheaten sheaf, While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain, Comes jovial on,
The season as a harvest god. The 'Doric reed' that follows signals pastoral and georgic poetry.
The lovely young Lavinia once had friends; And Fortune smil'd, deceitful, on her birth.
The opening of the Palemon and Lavinia tale, in which the virtue of the poor is shown to be the virtue of fallen gentility.
From Thee begin, Dwell all on Thee, with Thee conclude my song; And let me never never stray from Thee!
The address is to Nature, but the language is that of prayer: the line between Nature and God is deliberately thin.
Part 4: Winter
1–1069
Summary
Winter comes 'to rule the varied year', and the poet welcomes its storms as 'kindred glooms' that raise the soul to solemn thought, recalling his boyhood wanderings in the Borders. He addresses the Earl of Wilmington, then describes the coming of the season: rains and floods, the gathering of the winds, a storm at night, and the falling of the snow, as birds and cattle seek shelter and the robin comes to the cottage window.
In the snowstorm a shepherd loses his way. He wanders on, hoping to find his cottage, until he sinks into a drift and dies while his wife and children wait for him. The poet turns to the comfortable rich who never think of such suffering, to the poor, and to the cruelties of the debtors' prisons exposed by a parliamentary committee. Wolves sweep down from the Alps, and storms wreck ships on the coast.
In a rural retreat the poet spends winter evenings with the great dead: Socrates, Solon, the Roman patriots, Homer and Virgil. He describes the city's winter pleasures and the theatre, the frost and skating, the frozen lands of Lapland and Siberia, and the reforms of Peter the Great of Russia. A thaw brings floods, and the poem ends by turning the winter of the year into the winter of life, followed by the 'second birth' of a world in which all apparent evil will be explained.
Analysis
Winter was the first season written and the source of Thomson's fame. Its appeal lay in its sublime of storm and darkness, a mode encouraged by the critic John Dennis and later theorised by Burke, in which terror and gloom raise rather than depress the mind. The early version was short and largely personal; the later one surrounds the storms with history, social criticism and the frozen north (Cohen 1970) (Sambrook 1991).
The shepherd lost in the snow became the poem's most admired episode. Its power lies in the way the landscape itself is unmade: hills and rivers vanish under 'the formless wild', and the man's 'thoughts of home' drive him further astray. The scene turns at once into social protest, as the poet rebukes the 'gay licentious proud', and so joins the sublime to the humanitarian sentiment that runs through the poem (Spacks 1959) (Sitter 1982).
The ending gives the whole cycle a religious frame. The year becomes an image of human life, and winter's storms an image of the trials of the virtuous, which will be justified when the 'great eternal scheme' is seen whole. The final line promises an 'unbounded Spring' that will break the cycle the poem has followed, so that the poem's order of seasons resolves into a theodicy in the tradition of Pope's Essay on Man (McKillop 1942).
SEE, Winter comes, to rule the varied year, Sullen, and sad, with all his rising train; Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms.
The opening of the earliest-written season. 'The varied year' anticipates the 'varied God' of the Hymn.
As thus the snows arise; and foul, and fierce, All Winter drives along the darkened air; In his own loose-revolving fields, the swain Disaster'd stands;
The start of the shepherd's story. His own familiar fields have become unreadable, and the Latinate 'Disaster'd' suggests that the stars themselves are against him.
The storms of Wintry Time will quickly pass, And one unbounded Spring encircle all!
The last lines of the four seasons: the cycle of the year opens into eternity.
Part 5: A Hymn
1–118
Summary
The Hymn begins by declaring that the changing seasons 'Are but the varied God'. Each season shows a different attribute: Spring his beauty and love, Summer his glory and the voice of the thunder, Autumn his bounty, Winter his majesty in storms. The poet marvels at the art with which these different powers are combined, and at the blindness of those who do not see the hand that moves the year.
He then calls on the whole creation to join the hymn: the breezes, the trees, the streams and the sea, the sun and moon, the stars, the harvest fields, the birds of the woods and the nightingale, and at last human beings in their temples and in the country. The poet promises to praise God in every season, wherever fate may send him.
The poem ends with the poet's confidence that God is present even in the most remote lands, and that after death he will rise to new worlds where universal love brings good out of apparent evil 'in infinite progression'. Overwhelmed, he loses himself in God and calls on silence to complete the praise.
Analysis
The Hymn is modelled on the Psalms and on the morning hymn of Adam and Eve in Book 5 of Paradise Lost, which also calls on every part of creation to praise its maker. Its theme is the doctrine of physico-theology that underlies the whole poem: that nature, studied with attention, reveals the wisdom and goodness of God. Patricia Meyer Spacks took her title, The Varied God, from its second line (Spacks 1959).
Critics have asked whether the God of the Hymn is the God of Christian revelation or the 'universal soul' of the deists and of Shaftesbury. The Hymn says nothing of Christ, sin or redemption, and its God is known through the regular operation of nature rather than through scripture. Yet its fervour and its language of personal prayer are far from the cool rational religion often called deism, and recent critics have preferred to describe its religion as an enthusiasm disciplined by science (McKillop 1942) (Terry 2000).
As a conclusion the Hymn gives the poem a unity that its sprawling parts do not. It reads the four seasons as one cycle and one revelation, and it ends by abandoning description altogether for silence, as though the poem's endless catalogues of nature finally exceed what language can hold (Cohen 1970).
THESE, as they change, Almighty Father, these, Are but the varied God. The rolling year Is full of thee.
The theological thesis of the whole poem in two and a half lines: change in nature is the self-display of an unchanging God.
But I lose Myself in Him, in Light ineffable! Come then, expressive silence, muse his praise.
The poem ends by giving up speech; the oxymoron 'expressive silence' makes silence the last form of praise.
Characters
Figures in the landscape
- The speaker
- The poet himself, who walks, watches, studies and prays through the year. He recalls his boyhood in the Borders, retreats into woods and studies, addresses friends and patrons, and moves from description to reflection. His feelings for the scenes he describes are the thread that holds the poem together.
- The husbandman
- The farmer who drives his oxen to the plough at the opening of Spring. He stands for the georgic idea of labour as the foundation of civil life, though, like most of Thomson's labourers, he is seen from a distance and briefly.
- The shepherd lost in the snow
- The nameless 'swain' of Winter who loses his way in a snowstorm and dies in a drift while his wife and children wait for him. His story is the poem's most famous image of the sublime power of nature and of human helplessness before it.
- Celadon and Amelia
- A perfectly matched pair of lovers in Summer. Caught in a thunderstorm, Celadon assures Amelia that heaven protects the innocent, and at that moment she is killed by lightning in his arms. Their story raises the problem of undeserved suffering.
- Damon and Musidora
- Lovers in Summer. Damon comes upon Musidora bathing, leaves a note promising to guard her privacy, and finds her reply carved on a beech tree. The episode was one of the most often illustrated scenes in the poem.
- Palemon and Lavinia
- The rich farmer and the poor gleaner of Autumn. Palemon falls in love with Lavinia as she gleans in his field, discovers that she is the daughter of his late benefactor Acasto, and marries her. The tale retells the Book of Ruth.
- Amanda
- The poet's beloved, addressed in Spring and Summer. She represents Elizabeth Young, whom Thomson courted without success in the 1740s; the passages were added in the revisions.
Patrons and addressees
- The Countess of Hertford
- Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford, a patron of poets, to whom Spring is dedicated. She is praised as fit both for the court and for the meditative country life the season represents.
- George Bubb Dodington
- Politician and patron, to whom Summer is addressed. He was a leading figure among the opposition Whigs with whom Thomson became associated.
- Arthur Onslow
- Speaker of the House of Commons from 1728, addressed at the opening of Autumn as a model of patriot virtue and eloquence.
- The Earl of Wilmington
- Sir Spencer Compton, later Earl of Wilmington, the patron of Thomson's 'first essay', to whom Winter was dedicated in 1726.
- George Lyttelton
- Thomson's friend and patron, praised in Spring walking in his park at Hagley, his 'British Tempe', and planning the good of Britain. His wife Lucy appears as Lucinda. After Thomson's death he supervised a revised edition.
Others
- Isaac Newton
- The natural philosopher whose optics shape the rainbow passage of Spring and who is named in Summer among the glories of Britain. Thomson's poem on his death (1727) is a companion to The Seasons.
- Virgil
- 'The rural Maro', author of the Georgics, the poem's chief classical model. Thomson imitates his praise of the plough, his storms and his celebration of the fortunate farmer.
- Peter the Great
- The Russian tsar praised in Winter as a monarch who civilised a 'huge neglected empire', an example of what active government can do.
- The Mighty Dead
- The sages, patriots and poets of antiquity, from Socrates and Solon to Homer and Virgil, with whom the poet holds 'high converse' on winter evenings.
Themes
Nature as revelation
The deepest conviction of The Seasons is that nature, closely observed, reveals God. Every season displays an attribute of the Creator, and the movement from description to reflection is always potentially a movement towards worship. This is the argument of physico-theology, the science of God's design in creation, and it reaches its fullest expression in the Hymn (McKillop 1942) (Spacks 1959).
The poem's God is known through regularity and law, not miracle. That is why Thomson can praise Newton in the language of devotion: to understand the laws of light or of planetary motion is to understand the mind of their maker.
Science and wonder
Thomson draws freely on the science of his time: Newton's optics, theories of the origin of springs, the natural history of birds and insects, the geography of the tropics and the Arctic. Far from finding science cold, he treats it as a source of new imagery and new forms of awe (Nicolson 1946).
At the same time he values the untaught response of the child or the rustic. The rainbow passage sets the knowing eye beside the boy who runs to catch the arch, and the poem keeps both.
Labour and the georgic
Following Virgil, Thomson presents agricultural labour as the basis of civilisation. The plough, the harvest and Industry are praised as the forces that raised humanity from savagery to the arts and commerce.
Critics have noticed how far this praise keeps labour at a distance. The workers of the poem are cheerful, picturesque and brief, and the poet's own place is usually in the shade, the study or the prospect. The georgic ideal of honest work and the leisured viewpoint of the gentleman sit together uneasily (Barrell 1980) (Goodman 2004).
Britain, liberty and empire
The poem is patriotic throughout. It praises British soil, British liberty, British philosophers and poets, the navy and the trade that brings the goods of the world to British ports. These passages grew with the revisions, as Thomson became attached to the Patriot opposition to Walpole and the circle of Frederick, Prince of Wales (Gerrard 1994).
The same ideals underlie Liberty and 'Rule, Britannia!'. In The Seasons they appear alongside a strong sense of luxury and corruption, and even of the cruelty of the slave trade, so that national pride is mixed with warning.
Sensibility and benevolence
Thomson's narratives and reflections are full of tender feeling: pity for the shepherd's family, for the starving poor and imprisoned debtors, for animals hunted or caged. Like Shaftesbury, he treats the sympathetic feelings as natural and as a source of virtue.
The poem helped to form the culture of sensibility that dominated later eighteenth-century writing, in which the capacity to be moved by suffering is a sign of moral worth (Sitter 1982).
Retirement
The poet repeatedly withdraws from the world: into the shade in Summer, to the study in Winter, to the 'vale' of the happy man in Autumn. Retirement is the condition for contemplation, and the contemplative life is presented as superior to the life of ambition, luxury and party.
Yet the poem is also full of statesmen and public virtue. Thomson's retirement is never quite solitude; it is the retirement of a man who still addresses patrons and worries about the nation.
Change and the cycle
The year's round gives the poem both its subject and its frame. Each season contains the seeds of the next, and the poem dwells on transitions: the unsettled days of early spring, the evening of summer, the thaw of winter.
The final lines of Winter and the Hymn turn the cycle into a figure for human life and divine providence, promising a final spring outside the round of time.
Motifs
The prospect
Again and again the poet climbs to a height and surveys a wide landscape, as from Richmond Hill in Summer or Hagley in Spring. The prospect view joins visual pleasure to moral and political reflection, since the observer sees the whole order of the land, and it shaped the vocabulary of landscape painting and gardening (Barrell 1983).
Storms
Every season has its storm: the spring showers, the summer thunderstorm, the autumn tempest that flattens the harvest, the winter snow. Storms are the poem's chief occasions for the sublime and for questions about providence.
Episodes of love and death
Short narratives, Celadon and Amelia, Damon and Musidora, Palemon and Lavinia, the shepherd in the snow, break the descriptive flow. They were the most anthologised parts of the poem and gave its readers stories to set beside its scenes.
Catalogues
The poem moves by lists: of flowers, birds, insects, fruits, rivers, worthies and sages. The catalogue expresses the plenitude of creation, but it also explains Johnson's complaint that the poem lacks method.
The address to a patron
Each season opens with an address to a patron or friend, and more are added within. These addresses tie the descriptive poem to a world of politics and patronage and to the poet's own career.
Symbols
The rainbow
In Spring the rainbow stands for the meeting of science and wonder: explained by Newton's prism, it still enchants the boy who chases it. It became one of the poem's emblems for later painters and poets.
The plough
The plough represents georgic labour and the moral and economic foundation of the nation. Thomson asks Britons to 'venerate' it, as Romans once did.
The sun
In Summer the sun is the 'soul' of the planetary system, the source of life and even of the colours of gems. It stands for the active power of the Creator working through nature.
Spring as eternity
The 'unbounded Spring' at the end of Winter turns the first season into an image of eternal life, so that the whole cycle of the poem points beyond itself.
Critical debates
A poem without a plan?
Samuel Johnson, who admired Thomson's originality and his eye for nature, judged the great defect of The Seasons to be its want of method: since many appearances in nature exist at once, there is no reason why one should be described before another, and the poem's order seems arbitrary. Generations of readers have shared the sense that the poem is a sequence of fine passages rather than a whole (Johnson 2006).
Defenders have looked for other kinds of unity. Ralph Cohen argued that the poem's structure is not narrative but associative, built from contrasts, parallels and the movement from description to reflection, and that the cycle of the year and the scale of being give it a coherent design. Others have found unity in the Hymn's theology or in the controlling consciousness of the speaker (Cohen 1964) (Cohen 1970) (Spacks 1959).
Revision and the growth of the poem
The Seasons existed in several very different states between 1726 and 1746, and critics disagree about which deserves to be read. Some have preferred the early Winter for its freshness and personal voice; others see the revisions as a deliberate enlargement into a national and philosophical poem.
Ralph Cohen's The Unfolding of 'The Seasons' (1970) and James Sambrook's edition, which records every variant, made it possible to study the revisions in detail. Their work shows that Thomson's additions shifted the poem towards history, geography and politics, and that the final text is the product of a long dialogue between the poet and his changing world (Cohen 1970) (Thomson 1981).
Science and religion
Thomson's poem is one of the great literary witnesses to the reception of Newton. Marjorie Hope Nicolson showed how the Opticks transformed the language of colour and light in his verse, and Alan Dugald McKillop traced his reading in natural history and physico-theology (Nicolson 1946) (McKillop 1942).
Whether the poem's religion is Christian or deist is less clear. Its God is the designer revealed by natural law, and it says little of revelation; but its fervour is far from the rational detachment of the deists. Critics now tend to see Thomson as part of a broad latitudinarian and Shaftesburian culture in which natural religion and Christian piety were not sharply divided (Spacks 1959) (Terry 2000).
Patriotism, commerce and empire
The patriotic passages grew with Thomson's involvement in the opposition to Walpole and with his friendship with Lyttelton and the Prince of Wales's circle. Christine Gerrard has placed them within the 'Patriot' movement's myth of British liberty, which also produced Liberty and 'Rule, Britannia!' (Gerrard 1994).
Later critics have examined how the poem's celebration of trade and naval power relates to its pictures of the tropics and of the slave ship. Some read the poem as an ideological celebration of empire; others see in its moments of horror an uneasy conscience about the costs of commercial expansion (Barrell 1983) (Fulford 1996).
The georgic and labour
John Barrell's The Dark Side of the Landscape (1980) argued that the art and poetry of rural England presented labourers in ways that made them acceptable to a polite audience, cheerful, distant and contented, and that The Seasons set the pattern. In English Literature in History (1983) he described the gentlemanly prospect view as a claim to a comprehensive social vision available only to the propertied (Barrell 1980) (Barrell 1983).
Kevis Goodman has read the georgic differently, as a mode that registers the noise of history and the disturbances of commerce within its descriptions, and so as a precursor of Romantic poetry's attention to the pressures of the present. Earlier studies by John Chalker and Anthony Low traced the georgic tradition from Virgil and Dryden to Thomson (Goodman 2004) (Chalker 1969) (Low 1985).
Thomson and Wordsworth
In his 'Essay, Supplementary to the Preface' (1815), Wordsworth claimed that The Seasons was the first poem since Paradise Lost, except for one or two by Lady Winchilsea, to present new images of external nature. But he also argued that its popularity owed much to its false ornament and its sentimental episodes, and that true readers came to its genuine merits only gradually (Wordsworth 1974).
Critics have since debated how far Romantic nature poetry continued Thomson's descriptive-meditative mode and how far it reacted against it. John Sitter and Tim Fulford, among others, have shown the continuities: the solitary contemplative, the moral reading of landscape, and the link between nature and national liberty (Sitter 1982) (Fulford 1996).
Diction
Thomson's language, with its Latinisms ('refulgent', 'irriguous', 'effusive'), its compound epithets and its periphrases for birds and fish, has often been attacked as artificial. Wordsworth's attack on eighteenth-century 'poetic diction' made The Seasons a standing example.
More sympathetic readers have argued that the Latinate vocabulary is often precise, carrying the technical sense of the new science, and that the Miltonic syntax allows the poem to suspend and combine its images. The question is part of a wider reassessment of eighteenth-century poetic language (Cohen 1964) (Fairer 2003).
Key passages
Not so the boy: He wond'ring views the bright enchantment bend,
After explaining the rainbow by Newton's optics, the poet turns to a child who sees only enchantment and runs to catch it. The contrast does not belittle either kind of seeing; it shows the poem's wish to hold scientific knowledge and imaginative wonder together.
We feel the present Deity, and taste The joy of God to see a happy world!
The love of nature, the poet says, rises by degrees into religious rapture. The lines state the poem's central experience: contemplation of a happy creation becomes a sharing in God's own joy.
And, from the partners of that cruel trade, Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons, Demands his share of prey, demands themselves.
The shark that follows the slave ship devours both traders and enslaved people. The passage is an early poetic condemnation of the slave trade, and it sits uneasily beside the poem's praise of British commerce.
Let Newton, pure Intelligence, whom God To mortals lent, to trace his boundless works From laws sublimely simple, speak thy fame
In the catalogue of British worthies Newton is a gift of God, sent to reveal the simple laws behind creation. The lines express the poem's union of science, religion and national pride.
These are thy blessings, Industry! rough power! Whom labour still attends, and sweat, and pain;
The praise of Industry that opens Autumn admits the sweat and pain of labour before celebrating it as the source of civilisation. It is one of the poem's most direct engagements with the georgic theme of work.
Oh knew he but his happiness, of Men The happiest he!
A close imitation of Virgil's Georgics, Book 2, which blesses the farmer if only he knew his own good fortune. Thomson turns it into the praise of the retired man who lives with a chosen few far from public life.
Ah little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;
Immediately after the death of the shepherd in the snow the poet turns on the rich who never think of such suffering. The sublime episode becomes an occasion for social protest and an appeal to sympathy.
There studious let me sit, And hold high converse with the Mighty Dead;
On winter evenings the poet withdraws to read and meditate on the heroes and sages of antiquity. The lines express the ideal of studious retirement, and the phrase 'the Mighty Dead' became proverbial.
The storms of Wintry Time will quickly pass, And one unbounded Spring encircle all!
The last lines of the four seasons turn the year into an image of human life and promise an eternal spring after death. The poem's cycle resolves into providence.
THESE, as they change, Almighty Father, these, Are but the varied God. The rolling year Is full of thee.
The Hymn's opening states the theology of the whole poem: the changing seasons are the manifestations of one God. Spacks took the title of her study of the poem from these lines.
Questions for study
Is Johnson right that The Seasons lacks method?
Consider the order of the seasons, the scale of being in Spring, the single day of Summer, and the role of the Hymn. Compare Cohen's defence.
How does Thomson combine scientific explanation and religious feeling?
Look at the rainbow passage, the praise of Newton in Summer, and the closing prayer of Autumn.
What is the function of the narrative episodes?
Compare Celadon and Amelia, Damon and Musidora, Palemon and Lavinia and the shepherd in the snow. What questions does each raise?
How does The Seasons adapt Virgil's Georgics?
Think about the plough, the harvest, the praise of Industry and the praise of rural life, and about what Thomson leaves out.
How are labourers represented in the poem?
Consider the reapers of Autumn, the husbandman of Spring and the shepherd of Winter, and Barrell's argument about distance.
How does the poem's patriotism relate to its moral warnings?
Set the 'Happy Britannia' passage beside the slave ship, the criticism of luxury and the debtors' prisons.
What is sublime about Winter?
Think about storms, darkness and the formless landscape of the snowstorm, and about the poet's welcome of 'kindred glooms'.
What does the Hymn add to the four seasons?
Consider its view of the seasons as one cycle, its theology, and its ending in silence.
How did revision change the poem?
Think about the early Winter of 1726 and the final text, and about what kinds of passages Thomson added.
In what ways does The Seasons anticipate Romantic poetry, and in what ways does it differ?
Compare its descriptive-meditative method with Wordsworth's, and consider Wordsworth's own judgement of Thomson in 1815.
Further reading
- Barrell, John. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
- Barrell, John. English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey. London: Hutchinson, 1983.
- Chalker, John. The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
- Cohen, Ralph. The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's The Seasons and the Language of Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
- Cohen, Ralph. The Unfolding of The Seasons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970.
- Fairer, David. English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789. Harlow: Longman, 2003.
- Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Gerrard, Christine. The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
- Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Grant, Douglas. James Thomson: Poet of 'The Seasons'. London: Cresset Press, 1951.
- Johnson, Samuel. 'Thomson.' In The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.
- Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
- McKillop, Alan Dugald. The Background of Thomson's Seasons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1942.
- Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946.
- Sambrook, James. James Thomson, 1700–1748: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
- Sitter, John. Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
- Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Varied God: A Critical Study of Thomson's The Seasons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
- Terry, Richard, ed. James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
- Thomson, James. The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
- Thomson, James. Liberty, The Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
- Wordsworth, William. 'Essay, Supplementary to the Preface' (1815). In The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.