James Thomson Danced the Mind Dance of his Day.

Peter Gay makes an off-hand observation, in his classic study of The Enlightenment, so quietly stunning that even a dedicated traveler in the 18^th century might be left staring blankly at the page. I know I was.

James Thomson's Seasons, a comprehensive celebration of the metaphysical and aesthetic virtues of the new science, is only the best known of a host of poetic tributes to natural philosophy.¹

I've had my old Aldine Edition on the shelf now for decades. Ever since I was in my teens or early 20s, and on rare occasion, since my first reading, I've leafed its pages wondering whether the passage of years might bring it more alive.

In the meanwhile, I have often been shocked by just how aware Joseph Addison was of the science of the early 18^th century. At times he even intuits facts that had then yet to be formally discovered. I am also aware of Alexander Pope's famous lines celebrating England's most popular scientist, Isaac Newton, but somehow, it turns out, had read right over Thompson's.

Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds

Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;

And to the sage-instructed eye unfold

The various twine of light, by thee disclosed

From the white mingling maze. Not so the swain:

He, wondering, views the bright enchantment bend,

Delightful, o'er the radiant fields, and runs

To catch the falling glory; but, amazed,

Beholds the amusive arch before him fly;

Then vanish quite away.²

But I was less observant still. I had read Thomson's Seasons as an unusually capable transitional work away from rhymed couplets of the previous Alexandrian Age — in this case to unrhymed iambic pentameter, a.k.a. blank verse — a bit too intellectual for its subject.

The real point, however, is that science is everywhere in The Seasons and a good deal more. Thomson proves to have resoundingly been an early adherent of the Mind Dance — of employing contemporary images from science in formal poetry, of putting new wine in old wine-skins as it were. Uniquely so for the time. The famous poem of pudgy little James Thomson had been appreciated by Voltaire.³

Like every young reader, I was impatient. Now, at long last, I was ready to actually read the poetry of James Thomson.

Not only that but the science in his poetry has suffered the fate of all science, becoming outdated. It is an inevitable kind of naivete in this line of poetry, inevitably part of how and what it says, part of the charm. I've already had to accept that changes in the cosmos within which I wrote my own work have begun to co-write my poetry after a mere 10 or 20 years.

With what an awful world-revolving power

Were first the unwieldy planets launched along

The illimitable void! thus to remain,

Amid the flux of many thousand years,

That oft has swept the toiling race of men

And all their laboured monuments away,

Firm, unremitting, matchless, in their course;⁴

Imagine if Thomson had known that the universe has existed for at least 11 billion years. The solar system some 4.5 billion years. Not remotely the “many thousand years” that so impressed the science of his times with their magnitude.

Still, the stronger images remain intact, stunning even. Circa 1726, the poet understood that the limitations of our senses were a blessing.

These, concealed

By the kind art of forming Heaven, escape

The grosser eye of man: for, if the worlds

In worlds inclosed should on his senses burst,

From cates ambrosial, and the nectared bowl,

He would abhorrent turn; and in dead night,

When Silence sleeps o'er all, be stunned with noise.⁵

Our perception is proportioned to fit the limits of our brain's ability to process. If we saw every particle in our field of vision our sight would be nothing but chaos. If we heard every sound, no matter how small, we would be overwhelmed, at a loss how to make sense of it, deaf.

Wanting to paint realistic poetic scenes, Thomson seems to have anticipated the field of cultural anthropology. Scattered liberally throughout his poem are scenes that he has clearly converted from prose travelogues and medical accounts.

A boisterous race, by frosty Caurus pierced,

Who little pleasure know and fear no pain,

Prolific swarm. They once relumed the flame

Of lost mankind in polished slavery sunk;

Drove martial horde on horde, with dreadful sweep,

Resistless, rushing o'er the enfeebled south,

And gave the vanquished world another form.

Not such the sons of Lapland: wisely they

Despise the insensate barbarous trade of war;

They ask no more than simple Nature gives ;

They love their mountains, and enjoy their storms,

No false desires, no pride-created wants,

Disturb the peaceful current of their time;

And, through the restless ever-tortured maze

Of pleasure, or ambition, bid it rage.

Their reindeer form their riches. These their tents,

Their robes, their beds, and all their homely wealth

Supply, their wholesome fare, and cheerful cups.

Obsequious at their call, the docile tribe

Yield to the sled their necks, and whirl them swift

O'er hill and dale, heaped into one expanse

Of marbled snow, or far as eye can sweep

With a blue crust of ice unbounded glazed.

By dancing meteors then, that ceaseless shake

A waving blaze refracted o'er the heavens,

And vivid moons, and stars that keener play

With double lustre from the radiant waste,

Even in the depth of polar night, they find

A wondrous day enough to light the chase,

Or guide their daring steps to Finland fairs.⁶

This manner of scene-painting was genuinely new in his day. Though it might seem foreign now — some 300 years later — it was only a different kind of foreign then. A unique experience was available then to those who could receive it and is preserved for us now — expanded, actually.

1   Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment. The Science of Freedom. 127.

2  The Poetical Works of James Thomson, Vol. 1 (No date. 1860). 10.

3  Ibid. cxxviii. Voltaire to Mr. Lyttelton, May 17, 1790. “You was beneficent to Mr. Thomson, when he lived, and you is so to me in favouring me with his works. I was acquainted with the author when I stayed in England. I discovered in him a great genius, and a great simplicity,”

4  Summer, I.44.

5  Summer, I.52

6  Winter, I.176.

Also from the Library of Babel:

• The American Garden.  January 16, 2019.  “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
• Blank Verse Now and Then.  January 1, 2019.  “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.” 
• The Elegy and the Internet.  July 1, 2005.  ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’

• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

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• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

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