Mists in Autumn
by James Thomson
Now, by the cool, declining year condescend, Descend the copious exhalations, check’d, As up the middle sky unseen they stole, And roll the doubling fogs around the hill. No more the mountain, horrid, vast, sublime, Who pours a sweep of rivers from his sides, And high between contending kingdoms rears The rocky long division, fills the view With great variety; but in a night Of gath’ring vapour from the baffled sense Sinks dark and dreary; thence expanding far, The huge dusk gradual swallows up the plain: Vanish the woods; the dim-seen river seems Sullen and slow to roll the misty wave. Ev’n in the height of noon, oppress’d, the sun Sheds weak and blunt his wide-refracted ray, Whence glaring oft with many a broaden’d orb He frights the nations. Indistinct on earth, Seen through the turbid air, beyond the life Objects appear, and, wilder’d o’er the waste, The shepherd stalks gigantic: till at last, Wreath’d dun around in deeper circles, still Successive closing, sits the gen’ral fog Unbounded o’er the world, and, mingling thick, A formless gray confusion covers all.
For better or worse, we’re far likelier to know the chorus to “Rule Britannia” than we are to know its author’s name. Rather like the verses, to which nobody sings along, James Thomson (1700–1748) has faded, in the collective Anglophone memory, to a sort of human mumble between shouted rounds of that famous refrain.
Yet in his day, that brief halcyon day before the advent of Robert Burns (1759–1796) and his wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie, Thomson was the Scots poet of the eighteenth century. His four-part poem, “The Seasons,” from which Today’s Poem is excerpted, was an enduring best-seller, with one edition gorgeously illustrated by Joshua Reynolds. The poem sold so well, in fact, that after Thomson’s death, its success gave rise to a dispute over the publishing rights and, in 1774, a ruling in the House of Lords which declared statutory limits to copyright — which is why we at Poems Ancient and Modern can commemorate, belatedly, Thomson’s September 11 birthday, by reprinting this section of his bestselling publication.
Like all of “The Seasons,” this relatively short excerpt demonstrates both Thomson’s facility with blank verse and his dramatist’s reading of a landscape. The poem unrolls like a stage set moving into place, its actors taking their positions. It’s intensely visual, but visual in the way that drama, that kinetic art, is visual. Its initial composition continually generates new compositions as its elements shift and change. Though no humans are present in this landscape, other than the speaker who narrates it, everything about it is infused with human feeling and consciousness. Though the speaker, like the author himself, remains offstage and anonymous, still he remains present in everything he sees.
Of course, many classical music lovers, at least those of us with a taste for oratorios, know James Thomson and that poem quite well, because Haydn set extracts from it in his second great oratorio, The Seasons. (More precisely, he set a German translation by his patron Gottfried von Swieten--who also translated it back into English so Haydn could sell it to Brits unfamiliar with German; suffice it to say Thomson did a better job. Gottfried von Swieten was also the author of the libretto for his first great oratorio, The Creation. --The English version is rarely played, and you could not I think just set the original to the music, rather like Rachmaninoff's choral symphony The Bells set a translation of Poe's poem by Konstantin Balmont, which is a rendering too free to fit the English to it, but there I don't think anyone has tried.) It's a fun two and a half hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdQTz0OHbvc
Thomson sure deserves to be read more.
I read The Seasons years ago, in a volume that also included The Castle of Indolence, his poem in Spenserian stanzas.