James Thomson (2) (1700–1748)

HOT:
From the soft wing of vernal breezes shed,
Anemonies; auriculas, enrich'd
With shining meal o'er all their velvet leaves;
And full ranunculus, of glowing red.
Then comes the tulip race, where Beauty plays
Her idle freaks; from family diffus'd
To family, as flies the father-dust
The varied colours run. . .

NOT:
To give society its highest taste;
Well-order'd home man's best delight to make;
And, by submissive wisdom, modest skill,
With every gentle care-eluding art,
To raise the virtues, animate the show more bliss,
And sweeten all the toils of human life:
This be the female dignity and praise.

BLISS:
The western sun withdraws the shorten'd day;
And humid Evening, gliding o'er the sky,
In her chill progress, to the ground condens'd
The vapours throws. Where creeping waters ooze,
Where marshes stagnate, and where rivers wind,
Cluster the rolling fogs, and swim along
The dusky-mantled lawn. Meanwhile the Moon,
Full-orb'd, and breaking through the scatter'd clouds,
Shows her broad visage in the crimson'd east.
Turn'd to the Sun direct, her spotted disk—
Where mountains rise, umbrageous dales descend,
And caverns deep, as optic tube descries,
A smaller earth—gives us his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.

MISS:
Is not wild Shakspeare thine and Nature's boast?
Is not each great, each amiable Muse
Of classic ages in thy Milton met?
A genius universal as his theme;
Astonishing as Chaos, as the bloom
Of blowing Eden fair, as Heaven sublime.
Nor shall my verse that elder bard forget,
The gentle Spenser, Fancy's pleasing son. . .

and so on. such are the vicissitudes of early georgian verse. despite the lapses from descriptive euphoria, though they must have been necessary for the age, in which he praises not Britain's natural offers but its people and mores, falling for that ludicrous notion of "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd", and even sneaking in some disgusting Scotch mush about characters "Celadon and Amelia" — despite all that, i think SPRING, specifically, is a masterpiece. and all four poems have some of the very best blank verse i've read. it must be the English Eclogues and Georgics to Milton's Aeneid (and i always did prefer vergil's two former...) show less

Inherited book with Scottish Poetry in solid flowery hardbound wood and leather binding. Unreviewed 18th century poet.

[S]ome parts [of The Seasons] are frankly boring, and some (e.g. the bathing episode in Summer) are in a false taste. I don't myself think that any of it is as good as the opening of The Castle of Indolence: the second canto everyone gives up as hopeless.
- from a 1 October 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume I

'The Castle of Indolence' goes on excellently: it is quite a good imitation of Spencer, and has a certain shy humour mixed with it, which show more Spencer himself has not.
- from a 3 June 1917 letter to Arthur Greeves, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume I show less

REview by Alan Duglad McKillop