Countryfolk in Thomson’s seasons : the dark side of the landscape, or emblems of natural integration?

Abstract

It is generally assumed that James Thomson’s poetic cycle The Seasons (1730–1746) is is a celebration of nature’s omnipotence interspersed with pastoral or georgic episodes in which human protagonists reflect the contemporary trend in landscape painting towards representing idealised shepherds and happy swains. However, a closer reading of Thomson’s numerous desciptions of countryfolk reveals that his peasant figures are not mere ‘figures in the landscape’. On the contrary, they appear as key elements in the poet’s physico-theology. Inspired by John Barrell’s analysis of the ambiguities of the depiction of the ‘rural poor’ in eighteenth-century English painting and by Tim Fulford’s discussion of ‘landscapes of authority’, this paper would like to show that the numerous episodes of rural life in The Seasons were not intended as a superficial decor champetre . Our argument is that Thomson uses countryfolk as emblems of the complex relationship between nature and mankind. This paper analyzes the way descriptive elements from contemporary country life serve alternatively as sad reminder of man’s frailty when confronted to natural elements and also as unconscious models of human integration in the superior order of things. Despite their conventional appearance, these poetic constructions show evidence of a sharp departure from earlier definitions of the pastoral and georgic modes. In poetic and philosophical project of Thomson’s Seasons, countryfolk are a reminder that man is not a dweller in (and even less the master of) nature, but a component of the biosphere.