Today’s Poem: Mists in Autumn

James Thomson’s visual drama

August Strindberg, Björken I (Höst), 1902 (Wikimedia Commons)

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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.

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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.

after John Patoun, James Thomson, circa 1746 (Wikimedia Commons)

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. 

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