James Thomson was perhaps the eighteenth-century
author most responsible for the tradition we now think of as "nature poetry"
in British literature. His long poems, particularly
The Seasons
and
The Castle of Indolence had an incalculable influence on the
writers of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1700 amid the pastoral
landscapes of Roxburghshire in Scotland and left the University of Edinburgh
for London in 1725. The first complete edition of The Seasons appeared
in 1730, collecting rural and naturalistic verses that derived from his
Thomson's childhood in the Scottish border country and his widespread reading.
As his editor J. Logie Robertson notes, "Thomson's great merit lies in
his restoration of nature to the domain of poetry from which it had been
banished by Pope and his school" (viii). Thomson's poetic achievement rests
largely on his powerful descriptions of scenes drawn directly from
his own experience of the natural world:
I solitary court
The inspiring breeze, and meditate the book
Of Nature, ever open, aiming thence
Warm from the heart to learn the moral song.
And, as I steal along the sunny wall,
Where Autumn basks, with fruit empurpled deep,
My pleasing theme continual prompts my thought--
Presents the downy peach, the shining plum
With a fine bluish mist of animals
Clouded, the ruddy nectarine, and dark
Beneath his ample leaf the luscious fig.
The vine too here her curling tendrils shoots,
Hangs out her clusters glowing to the south,
And scarcely wishes for a warmer sky. ("Autumn,"
669-82)
He was equally accomplished, however, at producing vivid
descriptions of exotic climes which he had never visited but had only read
as described by others:
The tiger, darting fierce
Impetuous on the prey his glance has doomed;
The lively-shining leopard, speckled o'er
With many a spot and beauty of the waste;
And, scorning all the taming arts of man,
The keen hyena, fellest of the fell--
These rushing from the inhospitable woods
Of Mauritania, or the tufted isles
That verdant rise among the Libyan wild,
Innumerous glare around their shaggy king
Majestic stalking o'er the printed sand . . . ("Summer," 916-26)
The greater and lesser Romantic writers all owe a debt to Thomson's blank
verse cadences, his visual clarity, and his suggestion that the universe
beyond the human world contains objects and events of value. Here
is Thomson himself: "I know no subject more elevating, more amusing, more
ready to awake the poetic enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and
the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet with such
variety, such beauty, such magnificence--all that enlarges and transports
the soul? . . . But there is no thinking of these things without breaking
into poetry." Thomson died in 1748 and was buried in Richmond, memorialized
in Collin's "Ode." Without Thomson's verse, "nature" in the English speaking
world would seem to be a different world. (A.N.) |
