[…] sweet Poet of the year! […]
ROBERT BURNS: ‘Address to the Shade of Thomson’ (1791)
Thomson, the son of a minister, was a Scot who attended Edinburgh University. He came to London in 1725 where he wrote ‘Winter, a Poem’, the first part of The Seasons, which the reviewer in the London Journal of 4 June 1726 praised as attaining ‘the two great ends of poetry, of instructing and delighting the reader […]’. The Seasons was finally finished in 1730, then greatly expanded in the versions of 1744 and 1746. Thomson soon made the acquaintance of Gay and Pope, and was supported financially by Lord Lyttelton. Having travelled extensively through France and Italy as a private tutor, he published the patriotic Liberty (1735–6), and then produced a series of tragedies that are no longer read. The masque Alfred, written with his fellow Scot David Mallet (or Malloch) was performed in 1740, and contained the now celebrated ‘Rule, Britannia’, probably written by Thomson himself. The Castle of Indolence, a celebration of idleness and an allegory of material progress, was published three months before his death in 1748. He was buried in Richmond church and eulogized in what is possibly the most celebrated short funeral elegy in the language, William Collins’s ‘Ode occasioned by the death of Mr Thomson’ (‘In yonder grave a Druid lies,/Where slowly winds the stealing Wave!/The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise/To deck its poet’s sylvan grave! […]’). The Seasons, set to music by Haydn at the end of his life to the German text of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, owes much to Virgil’s Georgics and Milton’s Paradise Lost, but remains entirely original in its idealization of rustic innocence and its espousal of deism. It was greatly admired by Wordsworth, though Tennyson and Coleridge criticized the rather artificial diction; Coleridge, although he dubbed Thomson ‘a great poet, rather than a good one’, went on to say that ‘his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were natural’.
Goethe’s celebrated poem ‘Kennst du das Land’, which appears in Wilhelm Meister (both the Theatralische Sendung and the Lehrjahre) and was placed by the poet as the first of his ballads in his collected Works in 1815, is reminiscent of these lines from ‘Summer’ in Thomson’s The Seasons:
Bear me, Pomona! to thy citron groves;
To where the lemon and the piercing lime,
With the deep orange glowing through the green,
Their lighter glories blend. Lay me reclined
Beneath the spreading tamarind, that shakes,
Fanned by the breeze, its fever-cooling fruit.
Before Alfred. A Masque begins, the authors print ‘The ARGUMENT’:
After the Danes had made themselves masters in Chippenham, the strongest city in the Kingdom of Wessex; Alfred was at once abandoned by all his subjects. In this universal defection, that Monarch found himself obliged to retire into the little isle of Athelney in Somersetshire; a place then rough with woods and of difficult access. There, habited like a peasant, he lived unknown, for some time, in a shepherd’s cottage. He is supposed to be found in this retreat by the Earl of Devon; whose castle, upon the river Tau, was then besieged by the Danes.
At the end of the Masque, the Hermit beseeches Alfred to ride forth:
Britons, proceed, the subject Deep command,
Awe with your navies every hostile land.
In vain their threats, their armies all in vain;
They rule the balanc’d world, who rule the main.
When Britain first, at heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian Angels sung this strain:
‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
‘Britons never will be slaves.’
The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall:
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
‘Rule, &c.’
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful, from each foreign stroke:
As the loud blast that tears the skies,
Serves but to root thy native oak.
‘Rule, &c.’
Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame:
All their attempts to bend thee down,
Will but arouse thy generous flame;
But work their woe, and thy renown.
‘Rule, &c.’
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
And thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.
‘Rule, &c.’
The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair:
Blest Isle! with matchless beauty crown’d,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.
‘Rule, &c.’
Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come;
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veiled in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.
O Hartford1, fitted or to shine in courts
With unaffected grace, or walk the plain
With innocence and meditation joined
In soft assemblage, listen to my song,
Which thy own season paints – when Nature all
Is blooming and benevolent, like thee.
And see where surly Winter passes off
Far to the north, and calls his ruffian blasts:
His blasts obey, and quit the howling2 hill,
The shattered forest, and the ravaged vale;
While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch,
Dissolving snows in livid torrents lost,
The mountains lift their green heads to the sky.
As yet the trembling year is unconfirmed,
And Winter oft at eve resumes the breeze,
Chills the pale morn, and bids his driving sleets
Deform the day delightless; so that scarce
The bittern knows his time with bill engulfed
To shake the sounding marsh3; or from the shore
The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.
At last from Aries4 rolls the bounteous sun,
And the bright Bull5 receives him. Then no more
The expansive atmosphere is cramped with cold;
But, full of life and vivifying soul,
Lifts the light clouds sublime6, and spreads them thin,
Fleecy, and white o’er all-surrounding heaven.
Forth fly the tepid airs; and unconfined,
Unbinding earth, the moving softness strays.
Joyous the impatient husbandman perceives
Relenting Nature, and his lusty steers
Drives from their stalls to where the well-used plough
Lies in the furrow loosened from the frost.
There, unrefusing, to the harnessed yoke
They lend their shoulder, and begin their toil,
Cheered by the simple song and soaring lark.
Meanwhile incumbent o’er the shining share
The master leans, removes the obstructing clay,
Winds the whole work, and sidelong lays the glebe.
White through the neighbouring fields the sower stalks
With measured step, and liberal throws the grain
Into the faithful bosom of the ground:
The harrow follows harsh, and shuts the scene.