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.
Thanks first for the introduction to Strindberg as a painter. I know him as a writer indirectly, through Elias Canetti's description of his mother's passionate devotion to his works, but I didn't know that he was a painter.
I find the language in Thomson's nature scenes, like the one excerpted here, a bit tedious in its Miltonic inversions. Is "oppress'd" meant to modify "noon" or "sun"? If the Stanley Fish of "Surprised by Sin" were to take a look, he might say both, but that seems to give an easy out to the writer. I've noticed this problem in free verse (including mine, alas), so it's not simply a product of Thomson's aesthetic.
In a line from "Autumn" not included here, Thomson writes, "Strowed bibulous above I see the sands, / The pebbly gravel next...." He's writing about water as it works it way through soil strata down to "hardened chalk / Of stiff compacted clay." He can't just write, "I see strowed above the bibulous [absorbent] sands"--the meter's not right and the lack of inversion reveals an "unpoetic," straightforward statement, but at least a sensible one. I don't know exactly how a bibulous poet could be strowed about a landscape, but I'm willing to entertain the idea.
To the extent Thomson's descriptions are well observed, I can appreciate them.
"...a bit tedious..." That's almost an understatement for my reaction to this poem. I'm catching up on this and some other sites today after missing several days, so maybe I'm just in too impatient a frame of mind. But this one got off to a bad start with "condescend" in the first line and never really got back on track. Seems to me that, to put it briefly, the poem tries too hard. Maybe some other time.
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.
Thanks first for the introduction to Strindberg as a painter. I know him as a writer indirectly, through Elias Canetti's description of his mother's passionate devotion to his works, but I didn't know that he was a painter.
I find the language in Thomson's nature scenes, like the one excerpted here, a bit tedious in its Miltonic inversions. Is "oppress'd" meant to modify "noon" or "sun"? If the Stanley Fish of "Surprised by Sin" were to take a look, he might say both, but that seems to give an easy out to the writer. I've noticed this problem in free verse (including mine, alas), so it's not simply a product of Thomson's aesthetic.
In a line from "Autumn" not included here, Thomson writes, "Strowed bibulous above I see the sands, / The pebbly gravel next...." He's writing about water as it works it way through soil strata down to "hardened chalk / Of stiff compacted clay." He can't just write, "I see strowed above the bibulous [absorbent] sands"--the meter's not right and the lack of inversion reveals an "unpoetic," straightforward statement, but at least a sensible one. I don't know exactly how a bibulous poet could be strowed about a landscape, but I'm willing to entertain the idea.
To the extent Thomson's descriptions are well observed, I can appreciate them.
"...a bit tedious..." That's almost an understatement for my reaction to this poem. I'm catching up on this and some other sites today after missing several days, so maybe I'm just in too impatient a frame of mind. But this one got off to a bad start with "condescend" in the first line and never really got back on track. Seems to me that, to put it briefly, the poem tries too hard. Maybe some other time.
Yeah, Keats would intuit the dangers of being too beholden to Milton, but I'm not sure Thomson did.