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Chapter 1

The Person

Poetry, Personification, and the Composition of Domestic Society

When William Wordsworth launched a revolution in poetry by identifying personification with the old regime, he inaugurated a move that is echoed in the founding texts of a host of modern disciplines.¹ From sociology and anthropology (Auguste Comte and E. B. Tylor), to political economy, law, and psychoanalysis (Karl Marx, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Sigmund Freud), writers turn to personification to establish their own modernity, repeatedly defining this modernity against a primitive confusion of persons and things.² After Wordsworth, literary historians have centered their own tale of primitivism and progress on the figure of personification. In a typical articulation of this story, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics locates the line between old and new in the eighteenth century: a moment when “rational attitudes superseded the primitive imagination” and personifications lost much of the “emotional and quasi-mythical power” that they had enjoyed “in medieval morality plays or in Milton.”³ In this compressed version of a familiar Enlightenment narrative, something happens in the eighteenth century that reveals persons (humans) and things (nonhumans) to be the essentially different kinds we (moderns) know them to be. On this view, personification is both a product and a casualty of this revelation: cut off from myth and authentic animism, it survives only as a conventional device that is employed without conviction or consequence. Personification becomes merely poetic.

The persistent appearance of personification at the threshold of the modern suggests that we might be wary of dismissing the figure so quickly. Personification is not simply an empty archaism or vestigial remnant, as many modernizers would claim. Instead, the figure of personification appears peculiarly apposite to modernity itself, an order that Bruno Latour identifies with two logically interconnected but notionally segregated practices: purification, which fixes human persons and nonhuman things as distinct ontological kinds, and translation or mediation, which mixes these two kinds together.⁴ Indeed, the term “personification” is newly invented in the eighteenth century: the OED identifies Samuel Johnson’s dictionary entry as the first English use of the term. There, Johnson brings Latour’s modern practices together in a single phrase. Personification, Johnson writes, is “the change of things to persons.”⁵ After Johnson, critics and rhetoricians devote considerable time and space to charting the broad terrain of “things” and “persons” that this new figure is meant to bring together. Poets, in turn, take up the figure in a variety of different ways: from the vices and virtues of Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, Pope’s Dunciad, and Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, to the situations and emotions of Collins’s odes, to the animate vegetation and natural processes of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanical Garden.⁶ Personification emerges as a term and a central poetic practice in a period that proclaims itself newly modern. And the eighteenth-century fondness for personification reveals modernity to be marked less by the clear distinction between persons and things than by the persistent instability of these terms—an instability that often turns on the figure of the animal.⁷

In this chapter, I turn to one of the most widely read poems of the era, James Thomson’s The Seasons. In a period known for personification, Thomson is a peculiarly copious and various personifier, using this unmistakably literary device to pose ontological and ethical questions about the composition of persons, and about the relationship between different forms of life. Then, as now, Thomson’s poem was known for its precise natural descriptions and its technical literacy in a striking range of natural-philosophical discourses (including microscopy, hydrology, geology, optics, and natural history). It was also known for its use of all manner of personifications, from the allegorical personifications of abstract ideas, to the ascription to animals, objects, and elements characteristics that are more often associated with human beings, to the periphrases that designate birds, sheep, insects, bees, and chickens as, in turn, plumy, peaceful, unseen, happy, household, and feathery “people.” Critics have tended to laud Thomson’s achievements in natural description—to celebrate him as Wordsworth does, for returning British poetry to “external nature.”⁸ They have tended to dismiss his personifications much as William Hazlitt does, as “trite and mechanical common-places of imagery and diction.”⁹

My contention in this chapter is that Thomson’s personifications are neither mechanical nor trite. They are not an example of the “vicious style” or “false ornaments” that Wordsworth derides in Thomson’s poetry, nor of the unnecessarily “florid and luxuriant” diction of which Samuel Johnson complains.¹⁰ Instead, Thomson uses personification to do serious natural- and social-philosophical work. More specifically, he draws on the wider context of eighteenth-century discussions of the figure, as well as its much older prehistory, to connect uncertainties about both persons and things with animation—a mode of action that Thomson associates with animal life, and extends to all kinds of beings. In doing so, he registers the sorts of questions that emerge when the newly coined figure of “personification” creates its two grand realms of persons and things by uniting what classical rhetoric had considered separately: roughly, figures that represent speech and figures that represent action. In Quintilian, for example, “Prosopopoeia” or “personating Characters,” designates a figure that occurs whenever we “speak, as it were, by the Mouth of others,” and “speak, as we suppose they would have spoken.”¹¹ Quintilian imagines a striking variety of mouths by which one might speak: one’s own, or that of an adversary, a god, a ghost, a town, or Fame, as well as of “Boys, Women, People, [and] inanimate Objects.”¹² And he distinguishes this figure that represents speech from a species of trope that represents action: those “bold, and what we may call dangerous, Metaphors, [that occur] when we give Life and Spirit to inanimated Objects.”¹³ Quintilian’s examples of this type of metaphor include poetic phrases like Virgil’s “The wond’ring Shepherd’s Ears drink in the Sound” and colloquial expressions like “the Fields are thirsty.”¹⁴ In classical rhetoric, then, there is one figure that has to do with speech; there is another that confers “life and spirit,” the animation implied in the act of drinking, or sense of thirst.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Quintilian’s two rhetorical kinds are increasingly brought together, first under the heading of “prosopopoeia,” sometimes as “personation,” and finally, as “personification.”¹⁵ Critical discussions of the figure are marked by difficulties that stem from this move, as writers try to work out what it means to set action or animation (notions that are themselves not clearly distinguished) alongside speech and on the side of persons, as attributes that are figuratively conferred on other kinds of beings. Lord Kames defines personification, then, as “the bestowing of sensibility and voluntary motion upon things inanimate.”¹⁶ James Beattie identifies it as “those figures of speech that ascribe sympathy, perception, and other attributes of animal life, to things inanimate, or even to notions merely intellectual.”¹⁷ Hugh Blair calls personification “that figure by which we attribute life and action to inanimate objects,” which occurs whenever we “speak of stones and trees, and fields and rivers, as if they were living creatures, and … attribute to them thought and sensation, affections and actions.”¹⁸ And Joseph Priestley characterizes the figure similarly: personification, he writes, “converts every thing we treat of into thinking and acting beings. We see life, sense, and intelligence, every where.”¹⁹

These definitions are remarkable for two reasons. First, all register a shift in emphasis. Unlike Quintilian, eighteenth-century rhetoricians do not detail a multitude of possible personifieds, extensive lists of all the things that might be treated by this figure (ideas, objects, dead human beings, women, children, cities, gods). Instead, they seem content with vaguely comprehensive epithets like Kames’s “things inanimate,” Blair’s “inanimate objects,” or Priestley’s “every thing we treat of.” But now there is a proliferation on the other side of the figure, in the range of attributes that it is imagined to bestow: sensibility, voluntary motion, life, action, affection, sympathy, perception, intelligence. The second remarkable feature of these accounts is the kinds of attributes they catalog. Even though eighteenth-century rhetoricians define personification with the attribution of both speech and action, their definitions focus primarily on action, in its broadest sense of animation. While Johnson defines “person” as “human being,” the attributes that personification bestows properly belong, for Kames, to “sensible beings” and for Beattie, to “animal life.” Personification may change things to persons, as Johnson proclaimed. But very often, in these discussions, the attributes of personhood have more to do with sensible or animal life than with any specifically human being. The question that emerges from these discussions, then, is this: Is personification distinct from animation?²⁰

Descartes famously claimed that it was not, collapsing the distinction between speech and action into a solely human capacity for response or meaningful answer. Eighteenth-century discussions of personification follow Descartes in taking both speech and action to be the constitutive attributes of human personhood, and thus in aligning animals with things, as inanimate objects moved from without. But with their extensive lists of the kinds of actions that personification might bestow, these accounts also register uneasiness with Descartes’s conclusions, embedding epistemological and ontological questions about animal life and motion in their rhetorical definitions. Later literary critics and historians, by contrast, repeatedly imagine personification to operate as though the Cartesian divide between human and nonhuman, person and thing, were straightforward and set. Personification, in the Princeton Encyclopedia’s quite standard definition, is “a manner of speech endowing nonhuman objects, abstractions, or creatures with life and human characteristics.”²¹

Understood according to this sort of definition, the figure of personification can appear duplicitous, cloaking ontological uncertainty in a rhetorical move. Writing about Wordsworth’s attitude toward (at least some types of) personification, Frances Ferguson suggests that for Wordsworth, “personification in its simplest forms fails to recognize the difficulty of comprehending humanness” by suggesting “that there is a stable form to be projected.”²² Or, as Adela Pinch puts it, “personifications can suggest that we know what a person is.”²³ On this formulation, the ontological uncertainty that personification conceals concerns the human being, who is falsely reduced to a set of conventional characteristics. If this formulation underlies Wordsworth’s objection to personification, it elides the more extensive uncertainty on which poets like Thomson (as well as rhetoricians like Kames, Beattie, Priestley, and Blair) insist. Thomson acknowledges that we may not know what a person is. But he also suggests that we may not know what a person is not; or, who (or what) is a person. In what follows, I argue that Thomson develops a model of both personhood and society that privileges species over individuals, and animal motion over Cartesian response. Thomson’s ideas about persons and the society that they constitute will, I think, appear rather strange: his person looks nothing like Descartes’s human subject, and his society bears little resemblance to Latour’s modern constitution. As we look for ways to move beyond such familiar humanist forms, however, the oddity of Thomson’s vision is valuable. Aligning personhood and animal life, he sets literature to the task of domestication, understood most basically as a project of peopling a common world with more than human beings.²⁴

Personification for the People

Jonathan Swift did not care for Thomson’s Seasons because, as he put it, “they are all Descriptions and nothing is doing.”²⁵ Contrary to Swift’s complaint, however, The Seasons is a poem in which everything is doing. Animation is the primary mode of being in and of Thomson’s poem, which presents an elaborate vision of the whole “Earth animated” (Su, 296). Critics have repeatedly noted that Thomson’s descriptions teem with verbs or verbs-made-adjectives (the first fifteen lines of the poem, for example, describe a “dropping Cloud,” “shadowing Roses,” a “howling Hill,” a “shatter’d Forest,” and a “ravag’d Vale”) (Sp, 2, 4, 13, 14). But most understand Thomson to animate his descriptions of natural objects in order to emphasize his own perception, focusing on the operations of his mind rather than on the world outside.²⁶ This kind of reading can be traced back to Romantic critics like Hazlitt, who applauds Thomson because he “humanises whatever he touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying soul.”²⁷ On such readings, the life and soul of The Seasons are always the poet’s own, human attributes projected onto the natural world. Thus when John Barrell notes “the activity, the motion, of Thomson” (in particular, of Thomson’s syntax), he locates the source of this activity in the poet’s will to order the landscape and its objects, to act upon the landscape by composing it.²⁸ The Thomsonian poet projects or forces his own animation onto the inert landscape as he works it into shape, “recognizing the stretch of land under [his] eye not, simply, as that—as an area of ground filled with various objects, trees, hills, fields—but as a complex of associations and meanings … in which each object bore a specific and analyzable relationship to others.”²⁹ For Barrell, then, Thomson is not quite the poet that returned British poetry to nature. Instead, he is the poet that would overwrite human activity (poetic, political, economic) as natural process, disguising aesthetic and also social organization as natural order: to effect what Kevis Goodman has called “the pastoralization of the georgic.”³⁰

Barrell’s is an especially compelling and acute recent reading of Thomson, and its account of the political implications of Thomson’s poetics has been rightly influential. Most basically, Barrell argues that Thomson’s “idea of landscape” subordinates sense and particularity to abstract or conventional form: “For the idea to have any concrete existence it has to be applied to, or discovered in, a tract of land, but this tract of land is to be understood as hostile to the notion of being thus organized. The synthesis Thomson arrives at is one in which the objects retain to some extent their individuality—each landscape is different from any other—and yet appear to be organized within a formal pattern.”³¹ In passages like this one, Barrell objects to Thomson’s idea of landscape because it fails to free a particular place from formal organization, to fully depict “individuality.” He thus dismisses as wrongheaded ideology the common eighteenth-century idea that “‘natural objects readily form themselves into groups’” (the phrase is Kames’s).³² Barrell’s sense that composition is always imposition marks a major difference with Thomson and (as Barrell himself makes clear) with much of eighteenth-century nature poetry. This difference is aesthetic, ideological, and perhaps most basically, ontological. Barrell’s Marxism—his alertness to systems that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor—entails viewing Thomson’s poetry in fundamentally humanist terms, insisting that there is no activity or association outside the social domain of human beings. To grant nonhuman beings a capacity for activity—a capacity for form or forming relations—is an act of personification as obfuscation, attributing to nonhuman nature something that properly belongs to human beings.

Curiously, Barrell critiques Thomson’s personifying poetics—and behind him, the mainstream of eighteenth-century poetic and landscape aesthetics—by invoking a vocabulary that often enacts its own kind of personification. Throughout Barrell’s reading of Thomson, the landscape and its objects “suffer,” “demand,” and “retaliate”; they are “hostile,” “subjected,” “governed,” “subordinated,” and “imposed” on; they are “prevent[ed] … from asserting themselves at all.”³³ The logic and the stakes of Barrell’s personifications begin to come into focus when, quoting Kenneth Clark, Barrell remarks that Claude’s notebook drawings of trees “were not ‘ends in themselves … his mind was always looking forward to their use as part of a whole composition.’”³⁴ This Kantian language begins to indicate something important about the way that Barrell’s personifications differ from Thomson’s. Taking the individual human person to be the primary unit of both reality and moral life, Barrell uses personification first to transform things into individuals or ends, and then to shift attention from vehicle to tenor, from particular places to particular human beings. Barrell makes this move explicit when he contends that poets like Thomson could abstract from particular places so effectively because they “had very little sense of what can perhaps be called the ‘content’ of a landscape—I mean, they gave little evidence of caring that the topography of a landscape was a representation of the needs of the people who had created it.”³⁵ In a reading like Barrell’s, particular places represent and give way to particular human beings, those who actually “suffer,” “demand,” and “retaliate,” who are in fact “subjected,” “governed,” “imposed” on, and “subordinated.” By suppressing the individuality of a place, poets like Thomson support the oppression of its people; they “manipulated the objects in [the landscape] … without any reference to what the function of those objects might be, what their use might be to the people who lived among them.”³⁶ Defining the individuality or identity of a place with its function, its use, or the “intellectual, emotional, historical associations evoked” by its features, Barrell ultimately returns to human beings as the proper subjects of ethics.³⁷ It is these individuals that Barrell is ultimately concerned to portray and protect—not particular tracts of land, but the human beings who call them home.

I am reading Barrell’s account of Thomson somewhat against its own spirit and interests in order to suggest that Barrell’s quite modern and humanist ontology departs from Thomson’s in important and instructive ways. The basic unit of Thomson’s ontology is not the unique individual, and it is not necessarily human. As a result, Thomson’s personifications, unlike Barrell’s, do not begin (or end) with individual human persons. Instead, they start with the technique of periphrasis, which configures all kinds of beings as people—as well as, in Thomson’s other terms, as tribes, nations, troops, races, or kinds—rather than as persons in the sense of individuals, ends, or human beings. Critics who think about Thomson’s “people” have sometimes noted that the form of Thomson’s periphrases resembles the emerging form of natural-historical taxonomy. Ralph Cohen, for example, suggests that Thomson uses periphrasis to create a coherent binomial nomenclature, in which the “personification is implicit in the substantive, and the natural description in the adjective.”³⁸ On this interpretation, Thomson’s use of periphrasis would preserve the boundaries between humans and other kinds of beings, even as it brings them together in one classification system.³⁹ To my mind, though, Thomson apes taxonomic conventions in ways that confound rather than shore up distinctions between human and nonhuman beings. He calls sheep “soft fearful People” and chickens “houshold feathery People” just as he calls Greeks “lively People” and Romans “mighty People” (Su, 378; W, 87, 448, 498). He writes of “the Tulip-Race” in the same terms as he does of the “human Race” (Sp, 539; A, 1021); he refers to “the finny Race” of fish and the “soaring Race” of birds as well as to the “boisterous Race” and “Thrice happy Race” of Laplanders, and to “the toiling Race” or “the never-resting Race” of men (Sp, 395, 753; W, 836, 881; Su, 36, 726). He describes “the busy Nations” of bees and “the tuneful Nations” of birds just as he does “the guilty Nations” of humans (Sp, 510, 594; Su, 1711). “Human” is not the stable term in Thomson’s system of periphrastic personifications. If sheep and bees and flowers are personified in these phrases, so too are human beings.⁴⁰

Thomson does not use periphrasis to construct a Linnaean table of fixed and essential differences. Instead, he develops a system that seeks to replace natural-historical classification with his own taxonomical operation, using personification to define all kinds of beings as people—a term of relation rather than being, of sociality rather than individual essence. In this, the system created by Thomson’s periphrastic personifications comes closer to the classification systems Claude Lévi-Strauss describes in The Savage Mind. The “people” constituted by Thomson’s periphrases function as “species” do for Lévi-Strauss, to motor a perpetual movement between universalization and particularization, a movement in which species and individuals are not opposed, but terms that follow on one another.⁴¹ Lévi-Strauss describes this dynamic, which he calls the totemic operator: “It can be seen that the species admits first empirical realizations: Seal species, Bear species, Eagle species. Each includes a series of individuals … : seals, bears, eagles. Each animal can be analysed into parts: head, neck, feet, etc. These can be regrouped first within each species (seals’ heads, seals’ necks, seals’ feet) and then together by types of parts: all heads, all necks…. A final regrouping restores the model of the individual in his regained entirety.”⁴² In the totemic operation that Lévi-Strauss outlines, species are logically prior to individuals (as “people” are to “persons,” in Thomson’s terms): “the detotalization of the concept of a species into particular species, of each species into its individual members, and of each of these individuals into organs and parts of the body … issue into a retotalization of the concrete parts into abstract parts and of the abstract parts into a conceptualized individual.”⁴³ In such a system, moreover, the individual is not the unit of maximum difference or particularity, but a relational term that resolves difference into equivalence.⁴⁴ Heads, necks, and feet create individuals that are like every other, because they are composed of like parts.

I have invoked Lévi-Strauss because his account of the totemic operation provides a helpful model for what goes on in The Seasons—a poem that begins with all kinds of “people,” and then composes individual persons out of the parts and the actions of their composite bodies. In The Seasons, the body part that appears most often is the eye. Readers have tended to identify the myriad “eyes” in Thomson’s poem (eighty-one, on Cohen’s count) as Barrell does, with the eye of a poet-speaker.⁴⁵ For readers like Barrell, this eye is the primary instrument by which the poet tries to subdue a recalcitrant landscape, surveying objects and features from a distance and composing them into an alien and abstract form. Yet while some of Thomson’s “eyes” are identified as the speaker’s (“my searching Eye” [A, 785]), many are clearly attached to other human figures: “the conscious Eye” of Britannia’s daughters; the “downcast Eye” of Musidora; the “sad Eye” of the Russian exile (Su, 1594, 1280; W, 802). Others are explicitly not human: the “glancing Eye” of a dove, the “stedfast Eye” of a horse, the “deploring Eye” of cattle (Sp, 788; Su 510, 1125); or the “Eye” of Scotland, the “sacred Eye” of Day, the “kindling Eye” of Time, or the “ever-waking Eye” that is Providence (A, 932; Su, 916, 1520; W, 1020). Finally, most of Thomson’s eyes are oddly detached from either human or nonhuman beings. Thus when Thomson describes the pleasures of the shade to an eye and ear and heart, his repeated use of the definite article rather than a possessive adjective reminds readers of all the bodies that could be made up of such parts: “The Heart beats glad; the fresh-expanded Eye / And Ear resume their Watch; the Sinews knit; / And Life shoots swift thro’ all the lighten’d Limbs” (Su, 477–79). Like these different parts, the eye that sees a coming storm or struggles in the dark could belong to any body: “’Tis listening fear, and dumb Amazement all: / When to the startled Eye the sudden Glance / Appears far South, eruptive thro’ the Cloud”; “A faint erroneous Ray, / Glanc’d from th’ imperfect Surfaces of Things, / Flings half an Image on the straining Eye” (Su, 1128–30, 1687–89).⁴⁶ Thomson’s eyes do not impose human form on a hostile and alien nature, abandoning concrete particularity by assigning natural creatures and objects to preconceived classes. Instead, they link concrete and abstract by claiming equivalence between these many different eyes, and between the individual doves, horses, and humans that see through them. In this, Thomson’s poem again resembles Lévi-Strauss’s totemic system: first, using periphrasis to compose all kinds of people; then, decomposing people into parts, into eyes and ears and hearts; and finally, recomposing those parts on a different plane, into persons.

Person is not a term that appears in The Seasons, and this absence sets Thomson apart from the terms of Barrell’s critique, as well as from Kantian ideas of dignity, autonomy, or freedom. Like Barrell, Thomson uses personification to claim value for nonhuman nature, but he proceeds by way of “people,” a term above all for the kind of relation that Thomson calls “social.” The individual person, for Thomson, is not the foundation but the effect of relation; in The Seasons, to borrow and invert Barrell’s formulation, beings “retain to some extent their individuality” not although but because they are “organized within a formal pattern.” Working outside of familiar models of being and relation, Thomson’s poem generates remarkable conceptual as well as ethical possibilities. For his peculiar effort to compose all sorts of people into one great social whole takes the animal rather than the human being as its foundational term. And it understands the animal less as a type of being than as a mode of relation and of motion—the animation that is everywhere the method and aim of Thomson’s poetics.

Animation and the Composition of Domestic Society

In Thomson, I have been arguing, form is not something imposed on hostile individuals, whether human or animal. It is what enables individuals to come into being, as effects of the animation Thomson associates with animals and other people. This means that the persons precipitated from Thomson’s system of peoples are composed not only of corresponding body parts, but also of the motions and emotions of those parts: deploring, gazing, loving, demanding, musing. Such actions and affections link Thomson’s periphrasis to the more common form of personification described by Kames, Beattie, Blair, and Priestley: the figure of animation that ascribes sensibility, voluntary motion, life, action, affection, sympathy, or perception to “things inanimate,” an ever shrinking category in Thomson’s nature. Animation is the most pervasive type of personification that appears throughout The Seasons, and it is also the most fugitive—very often difficult to pin down, or to confidently distinguish from straightforward natural description.⁴⁷ At times, Thomson clearly signals the ascription of action or affection as ascription: in the summer heat, “Streams look languid from afar” and “seem / To hurl into the Covert of the Grove” (Su, 448–50). Thomson similarly distinguishes the responses of different creatures to an approaching rain shower:

Th’ uncurling Floods, diffus’d

In glassy Breadth, seem thro’ delusive Lapse

Forgetful of their Course. ’Tis Silence all,

And pleasing Expectation. Herds and Flocks

Drop the dry Sprig, and mute-imploring eye

The falling Verdure. Hush’d in short Suspense,

The plumy People streak their Wings with Oil,

To throw the lucid Moisture trickling off;

And wait th’ approaching Sign to strike, at once,

Into the general Choir. Even Mountains, Vales,

And Forests seem, impatient, to demand

The promis’d Sweetness. Man superior walks

Amid the glad Creation, musing Praise,

And looking lively Gratitude. (Sp, 159–72)

In this section, floods, mountains, vales, and forests seem “Forgetful” or “impatient” or “to demand.” By contrast, neither herds nor flocks nor humans seem to do, to think, or to feel: herds and flocks simply “mute-imploring eye” the verdure; man walks “musing Praise.” In such passages, Thomson accords different faculties to different kinds of beings. Describing the motions and emotions of both humans and animals, moreover, he locates the crucial line of difference not between human and nonhuman but between animate and inanimate beings. Forests only seem to demand; herds and humans actually do.

At other moments, however, Thomson suggests that even this difference is not certain. He makes this point as he pictures insects brought to life by the sun:

Swarming they pour; of all the vary’d Hues

Their Beauty-beaming Parent can disclose.

Ten thousand Forms! Ten thousand different Tribes!

People the Blaze. To sunny Waters some

By fatal Instinct fly; where on the Pool

They, sportive, wheel; or, sailing down the Stream,

Are snatch’d immediate by the quick-eyed Trout,

Or darting Salmon. Thro’ the green-wood Glade

Some love to stray; there lodg’d, amus’d and fed,

In the fresh Leaf. Luxurious, others make

The Meads their Choice, and visit every Flower,

And every latent Herb: for the sweet Task,

To propagate their Kinds, and where to wrap,

In what soft Beds, their Young yet undisclos’d,

Employs their tender Care. (Su, 247–61)

Many of the insectan actions that Thomson charts here might be easily explained by “fatal instinct,” while others—actions that involve faculties commonly reserved for human beings—might simply mix rhetorical modes. On this sort of reading, phrases like “They, sportive, wheel” or “Some love to stray,” embed personification (“sportive” or “love”) in natural description (“They wheel,” “Some stray”). Yet with the several terms for motion that he uses in this passage, Thomson hedges against this reading. Physical actions are not consistently kept separate from those that imply some higher or mental faculty, but often come together in single terms: terms like “stray” and “visit,” which describe physical motion—the path of insects from glade to flower—and, at the same time, faintly suggest the kind of intentionality that a word like “choice” asserts more directly. And just as terms like “stray” and “visit” unsettle clear distinctions between different modes of animation, other terms complicate even the basic divide between animate and inanimate: terms like “wheel,” “sail,” and “dart,” in which—with the contraction that transforms a phrase such as “move like a wheel” into “wheel”—nouns become verbs, things become actions. By confounding efforts to separate mind from motion or moving from being moved, Thomson reminds us that one cannot see love or amusement, know whether flocks “mute-imploring eye” or merely “eye,” whether man “walks / … musing Praise” or merely “walks.” In careful juxtapositions of human and nonhuman creatures and of perceptible and imperceptible actions, Thomson suggests that personification and natural description are not clear and distinct modes. Every action is in some sense an animation: something that is described by means of personification.

In part, this is an epistemological point about the perceptual difficulty of apprehending action. Thomson suggests that “seem” may not always need to be qualified by “only” (as in, forests only seem to demand, while humans actually do). Some things seem a certain way because that is simply what they are. In the case of animate beings in particular, appearance is the best indication of—or, simply is—essence. For Thomson, this is also a point about what action is: something less clearly agentive than we tend to think, and less clearly set apart from other modes of motion or movement. Thomson makes this point in part by using personification to do something besides attribute “human” or mental actions to other creatures—very often, to do something like the inverse. While birds sympathize and insects sport and make choices, Thomson’s humans often perform actions typically associated with other kinds. Like the “fluttering Wing” of a fly, men “flutter on / From Toy to Toy, from Vanity to Vice”; so too a fop is “a gay Insect … light-fluttering,” and a human mother holds her child “to her fluttering Breast” (Su, 278, 348–49; W, 644–45; Su, 933). Like the insects “Swarming” forth in Summer, a Village “swarms … o’er the jovial Mead”; again in Winter, “The City swarms intense” (Su, 247, 352; W, 630). Thomson’s terms do not only traverse the territory between humans and nonhuman animals; they also cut across other distinctions of kind. As insects and humans do elsewhere, birds “Thick-swarm” over floods, this time “Like vivid Blossoms” (Su, 734–35). Human agency is in turn often cast as vegetable growth: humankind begins, “With various Seeds of Art deep in the Mind / Implanted”; the Sun “rears and ripens Man, as well as Plants” (A, 50–51; W, 939). Parents are gardeners who cultivate a “human Blossom,” working “to rear the tender Thought, / To teach the young Idea how to shoot, / To pour the fresh Instruction o’er the Mind” (Sp, 1147, 1152–54). Like much of Thomson’s poem, these lines derive something of their logic from the second book of the Georgics, where Virgil uses terms of child rearing to instruct the husbandman on how to cultivate vines: advising, in Dryden’s translation, that he teach young plants how to “lift their Infant Head[s]”; use stakes as crutches to help them “learn to walk”; show tenderness to his “Nurseling[s]” in their “Nonage,” and “Indulge their childhood.”⁴⁸ But Thomson does not counsel farmers to rear plants like children; rather, he advises parents to rear children (and ideas) like plants.

The crossings that Thomson enacts between human, animal, and vegetable begin to indicate the strangeness of what we might think of as Thomson’s philosophy of action, as well as the kind of ethical and social relations that he envisions. If blossoms swarm like humans and humans grow like blossoms, then humans, like flowers, frequently require external force to be moved. Man remained idle, Thomson declares, “till INDUSTRY approach’d / And rous’d him from his miserable Sloth,” “breathing high Ambition thro’ his Soul” (A, 72–73, 93). Even in Liberty and The Castle of Indolence, poems explicitly concerned with political action, Thomson depicts action not as the product of agentive individuals but as an effect of personified motives: of Liberty, “whose vital Radiance calls / From the brute Mass of Man an order’d World”; and of Industry, who stirs a crowd into action as the sun melts snow:

Strait, from the Croud,

The better Sort on Wings of Transport fly.

As when amid the lifeless Summits proud

Of alpine Cliffs, where to the gelid Sky Snows pil’d on Snows in wintry Torpor lie, The Rays divine of vernal Phoebus play; Th’ awaken’d Heaps, in Streamlets from on high, Rous’d into Action, lively leap away, Glad-warbling through the Vales, in their new Being gay.⁴⁹

Moving human beings from without, allegorical personifications like Liberty and Industry might seem to dispersonify or to reify human beings, much as Stephen Knapp suggests in his study of eighteenth-century personification. Knapp argues that Milton’s personifications of Sin and Death troubled eighteenth-century readers because of the reversibility they risked. By permitting personifications to act like persons—by allowing Sin and Death to act like Adam and Eve—Milton threatened what Coleridge would later refer to as “the sacred distinction between things and persons.”⁵⁰ As Knapp puts it, “Once the boundaries between literal and figurative agency were erased, it seemed that nothing would prevent the imagination from metaphorizing literal agents as easily as it literalized metaphors.”⁵¹ For my purposes, a central insight of Knapp’s account is that of all the “human characteristics” that personification might confer, agency is peculiarly unsettling. By according agency indiscriminately to all kinds of beings, personification threatens accounts of personhood that depend on distinguishing human action from the movements of other kinds.

For Thomson, this is precisely personification’s promise: the capacity to reconfigure agency as animation, and thus to distribute it more widely. Like Knapp, Thomson understands personification to confer agency, and like Kames, Beattie, Priestley, and Blair, he connects this agency to sentiment: to mental actions or affections like imploring or musing or being amused. For Thomson, however, these attributes are proper not to human beings but to persons and to peoples—proper, in other words, not to some given natural kind, but to beings constituted by means of personification. Further, Thomson does not define the agency of persons with a Cartesian capacity for response, the capacity to move with meaning. Instead, he runs agency and sentiment together, defining persons by a capacity to be moved. In this, he identifies persons with something that looks very much like animal motion: a mode of action in which moving and being moved is difficult to parse, because its source straddles the line commonly drawn between individual and species, between inside and out.

The eighteenth-century term for this mode of both motion and feeling is passion; it is a type of agency that is not exactly agentive.⁵² Thomson thus depicts the central passion of The Seasons—Love—less as an internal feeling than as an external force, an animating principle that extends from God to bind “this complex stupendous Scheme of Things” (Sp, 858). In Spring, “the Soul of Love is sent abroad”; it moves “Warm thro’ the vital Air, and on the Heart / Harmonious seizes” (Sp, 582–84). Love first seizes on the hearts of birds, who are bound by this “soft Infusion” into pairs and then to the offspring they produce: “O what Passions then, / What melting Sentiments of kindly Care, / On the new Parents seize!” (Sp, 588, 674–76). Love proceeds to “seize” on the hearts of bulls, sea creatures, and finally, human beings, who are similarly moved by “th’infusive Force of Spring” (Sp, 868). In his turn with the theme of the passions of the groves, Thomson once again both draws on and departs from a Virgilian model. In the Georgics, Virgil also pictures the influence of love over “every Creature, and of every Kind”; as in Thomson, “Love is Lord of all; and is in all the same.”⁵³ Yet if the reach of love is similar in both poets, the nature and effects of the passion differ widely. In Virgil, love is a “rage” that affects one creature after another, turning each away from family and its fellows: he relates that “with this rage, the Mother Lion stung / Scours o’er the Plain; regardless of her Young”; and that “to battle Tygers move; / … enrag’d with love.”⁵⁴ In Thomson, by contrast, the primary effect of love is homemaking. Thomson describes a bird under the more gentle and sociable sway of this animal passion, moved not to battle or the plain but “to build his hanging House,” to construct his “Habitation” and “airy City” (Sp, 655, 660, 769). The proper work of love, in Thomson, is to construct social relations conceived in explicitly domestic terms: the poet thus takes up his “rural Seat” that he “might the various Polity survey / Of the mixt Houshold-Kind” (766, 771–72). This “polity” of “mixt Houshold-Kind” is the crux of Thomson’s social vision: a domestic society that extends well beyond humanity to include all the beings under the influence of “Love.”

Thomson’s domestic society is composed of the affective ties of couple, kin, and kind. This is the work of love, as Thomson conceives it. This society is also composed of commercial and economic relations, in both a narrow and an expansive sense. This is the work of industry, a passion that Thomson aligns closely with love. (Indeed, Autumn—the book devoted to Industry, as Spring is to Love—opens with a tale that unites these passions in the persons of Palemon and Lavinia, a farmer and the maid who gleans in his fields. Their industry gives rise to love, which in turn gives rise to industry.) For Thomson, industry and love are both forces of domestication. Without industry, Thomson writes, man is “Naked, and helpless, out amid the Woods, / And Wilds,” nothing more than a “sad Barbarian, roving / … / For Home he had not” (A, 48–49, 57, 65). If love gives rise to the couple and so to the household, then industry gives rise to commerce, which Thomson pictures as an expanded domestic sphere, a household that might incorporate all of nature. In Liberty, for example, Thomson celebrates the Roman and British empires for enlarging domestic relations, for moving “Round social Earth to circle fair Exchange, / And bind the Nations in a golden Chain” (4.436–38); in The Castle of Indolence, he lauds the Knight of Industry because he “Bade social Commerce raise renowned Marts, / Join Land to Land, and marry Soil to Soil, Unite the Poles” (2.174–76). The Seasons similarly extols the civilizing force of empire, as that which in “generous Commerce binds / The Round of Nations in a golden Chain,” which “in unbounded Commerce mix’d the World” (Su, 138–39, 1012).

In such passages, Thomson invokes the image of the great chain of being to describe and to justify empire.⁵⁵ He is often and understandably charged with thereby attempting to naturalize social relations. At the same time, the relationship between the natural and the social is complicated in Thomson, and his effort moves equally in the opposite direction: Thomson seeks to socialize nature, to constitute the whole of the earth as one great domestic society. The same attitude that underwrites his praise of “generous” or “social” empire thus informs his critique of those who act against the ethos of his domestic vision. These include agents of human empire that Thomson sees as neither generous nor social—those who “Rush into Blood, the Sack of Cities seek; / … / By legal Outrage, and establish’d Guile, / The social Sense extinct” (A, 1281, 1288–89). They also include “the guilty Nations” of human beings that plunder “the busy Nations” of bees, gathering honey by robbery and murder rather than the more peaceable relations of commercial exchange (Sp, 510; Su, 1711). The same principle directs Thomson’s polemic against mistreating and even eating domestic animals:

The Beast of Prey,

Blood-stain’d, deserves to bleed: but you, ye Flocks,

What have you done; ye peaceful People, What,

To merit Death? You, who have given us Milk

In luscious Streams, and lent us your own Coat

Against the Winter’s Cold? And the plain Ox,

That harmless, honest, guileless Animal,

In What has he offended? He whose Toil,

Patient and ever-ready, clothes the Land

With all the Pomp of Harvest; shall he bleed,

And struggling groan beneath the cruel Hands

Even of the Clowns he feeds? And That, perhaps,

To swell the Riot of th’autumnal Feast,

Won by his Labour? (Sp, 357–70)

Thomson contends that because “peaceful People” like sheep and oxen contribute to human well-being (with milk and coats and labor), human beings are bound to contribute to the well-being of sheep and oxen. In Thomson’s configuration, sheep shearing becomes a model act, replacing “the Knife / Of horrid Slaughter” with an instrument of industry and commerce, “the tender Swain’s well-guided Shears” (Su, 417–18). As Thomson explains to the “dumb complaining” sheep, this is a fair trade: the swain, “to pay his annual Care, / Borrow’d your Fleece, to you a cumbrous Load” (Su, 416, 419–20).

In such moments, Thomson’s domestic system brings humans and animals together on a model that resembles contract, as he explains the terms of agreement to sheep. But more often, Thomson’s mixed household polity is composed not by the consent of discrete individuals (whether human or no), but by allegorical personifications like Love and Industry—passions that bind all sorts of beings in affective and economic relations that very often exceed one’s assent or even knowledge. For all that such personifications are clearly and conspicuously figurative, they create real obligations in Thomson. At least, they register the fact that, like sheep who do not consent to trade fleece for care nor even understand that they do, humans may be obliged to all kinds of things from which they unknowingly benefit. Thomson’s description of “The various Labour of the silent Night” and “the Frost-Work fair,” for example, refers to “The pendant Icicle” that this labor produces, along with a whole series of beneficial and far-reaching effects: frost fertilizes soil, purifies air, strengthens our bodies and our spirits (W, 747, 750). Describing the products of frost work in the same terms (of labor and work) that he uses to demand ethical consideration for domestics like sheep and oxen, Thomson implies that such consideration might extend beyond humans and animals to all the elements that toil for some greater good. Thomson’s domestic social vision—his image of a great chain that binds both nations and natural elements—seeks to incorporate all kinds of beings in a system of both economic and ethical obligation.

In many respects, this vision resembles the model of natural sociability associated with the moral sense tradition, and with Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, in particular—“generous ASHLEY,” whom Thomson sets alongside Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and Newton in his roll of great British philosophers (Su, 1551). In its simplest and perhaps most familiar form, Shaftesburian philosophy grounds ethics in the natural affections of every creature, aligning private and public good, self-love and social affection. “In the passions and affections of particular creatures, there is a constant relation to the interest of a species or common nature,” Shaftesbury writes in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit; “nature has made it to be according to the private interest and good of everyone to work towards the general good.”⁵⁶ Private and general interest line up in this way because for Shaftesbury, as for Thomson, every particular creature essentially is an element in some composition. Whether one is a human or an animal or even an organ, one’s virtue and one’s identity depend on “that whole of which he is himself a part.”⁵⁷ At times, Shaftesbury calls this whole the “public” or “society”; sometimes one’s “kind,” “species,” or “common nature”; sometimes he calls it an “economy” or “system”; sometimes it is simply the “general” or the “whole.”⁵⁸ Shaftesbury’s various terms would seem to designate wholes of significantly different scope and kind (some social, some natural). But Shaftesbury does not discuss these differences, or even appear to view them as such. Instead, he insists that the same logic underwrites what might look like different types of relation: between two bodily organs, between the male and female of a species, between spider and fly, and potentially, between all living and nonliving beings. Everything in nature, Shaftesbury suggests, is a part of an ever-expanding whole, which he calls “an animal order or economy”: “If a whole species of animals contributes to the existence or well-being of some other, then is that whole species, in general, a part of some other system…. Now, if the whole system of animals, together with that of vegetables and all other things in this inferior world, be properly comprehended in one system of a globe or earth and if, again, this globe or earth itself appears to have a real dependence on something still beyond, as, for example, either on its sun, the galaxy or its fellow-planets, then is it in reality a part only of some other system.”⁵⁹ Ultimately, Shaftesbury suggests, one might be comprehended by a system of uncertain and potentially unlimited proportions.

Thomson takes up Shaftesbury’s expansive vision as both an epistemological challenge and an ethical imperative. Like Shaftesbury, Thomson wants to ground a universal ethics on an ontology in which one’s identity essentially depends on the whole of which one is a part—a whole that again is alternately presented in economic, social, and ecological terms. But Thomson’s Shaftesburian vision takes some peculiar turns, not least because of the central role Thomson accords personification in composing the great system of nature, the vast animal order or economy of which every one is a part. Some of the most heavily personified sections of The Seasons are those in which Thomson is most closely engaged with matters of natural-philosophical knowledge—with describing nature as it actually is. When Thomson sets out to replace the older hydrologic theory of percolation with the new theory of condensation, for example, he begins by depicting the former as the product of improper personification:

But hence this vain

Amusive Dream! Why should the Waters love

To take so far a Journey to the Hills,

When the sweet Valleys offer to their Toil

Inviting Quiet, and a nearer Bed?

Or if, by blind Ambition led astray,

They must aspire; why should they sudden stop

Among the broken Mountain’s rushy Dells[?] (A, 756–63)

This passage does not suggest that percolation theory is a “vain / Amusive Dream” because it personifies a natural object, attributing agency and affections to water. Instead, Thomson insists that percolation theory is an amusive dream because it attributes a particular kind of agency and affection: water is led by “blind Ambition” to toil alone, ignoring the invitations of the “sweet Valleys.” Thomson supplants this picture of a solitary self with a vision of harmonious system:

I see the Rivers in their infant Beds!

Deep deep I hear them, lab’ring to get free!

I see the leaning Strata, artful rang’d; The gaping Fissures to receive the Rains, The melting Snows, and ever-dripping Fogs. Strow’d bibulous above I see the Sands, The pebbly Gravel next, the Layers then, Of mingled Moulds, or more retentive Earths, The gutter’d Rocks and mazy-running Clefts; That, while the stealing Moisture they transmit, Retard its Motion, and forbid its Waste. (A, 808–18)

In this passage, Thomson does not replace personification with a more naturalist mode of description. Instead, he reconfigures personification so that it does not picture a central agent toiling without regard to others, but instead composes a system of relations that unites its elements and directs their movement:

United, thus,

Th’ exhaling sun, the Vapour-burden’d Air,

The gelid Mountains, that to Rain condens’d

These Vapours in continual Current draw,

And send them o’er the fair-divided Earth,

In bounteous Rivers to the Deep again,

A social Commerce hold, and firm support

The full-adjusted Harmony of Things. (A, 828–35)

Throughout this section, Thomson uses personification to compose a Shaftesburian animal economy, a “social Commerce” in which all sorts of “Things” are animated by affections that are directed to the good of the whole. Sun, air, mountains—and even more intricately, rivers, strata, fissures, rain, snows, fogs, sands, gravels, rocks, and clefts—all work together toward one end.

At the same time that this kind of passage envisions sociability on an explicitly Shaftesburian model, it also brings the uniqueness of Thomson’s social vision into focus. Throughout his work, Shaftesbury often turns to the figure of the animal in a way that is fairly familiar: in order to naturalize social organization, granting the authority of nature to everything from heterosexual coupling, to class distinctions, to a carnivorous diet. Thomson does something more unusual. Like Shaftesbury, Thomson takes the animal as a model for the kind of society he is after, and for the movement that brings such society into being. But in Thomson, the animal and its economy is not natural in the way that it is for Shaftesbury—something given, logically prior to the material labor of social organization or the figurative work of poetic composition. The Thomsonian animal—and so, Thomsonian nature—is a self-consciously rhetorical product, the effect of personification understood as a literary, social, and material operation. This vision of nature distinguishes Thomson from Shaftesbury, and the difference is marked by their respective key terms: Thomson’s “people” and Shaftesbury’s “species,” a term that Thomson, despite his interest in natural history, does not use.⁶⁰ In other words, if Thomson seems to follow Shaftesbury in suggesting that the social order is natural, this is in part because he everywhere imagines the natural order in social terms. On Thomson’s view, nature is indeed one great domestic society, a “full-adjusted Harmony of Things” supported by “social Commerce.” But although this social commerce extends (at least ideally) to all of nature, it is not exactly natural. It is both made and made visible by means of personification.

Wilderness, Selfhood, and the Limits of Domestic Society

If Thomson does not separate nature from society in The Seasons, he does single out figures that appear incompatible with his vision of social nature: figures like the “Beast of Prey, / Blood-stain’d,” or “The villain Spider” who waits “in eager Watch” for a fly and who, “fixing in the Wretch his cruel Fangs, / Strikes backward grimly pleas’d” (Sp, 357–58; Su, 268–78). Such figures dominate the landscape in “the torrid Zone,” where, Thomson remarks, “the Wilderness resounds, / From Atlas Eastward to the frighted Nile” (Su, 632, 937–38). In this wilderness, Thomson sees no system of reciprocity or toil for the general good but only solitary predators like the serpent, tiger, leopard, hyena, lion—animals who are moved by “rage” rather than love as they, “scorning all the taming Arts of Man, / … / Demand their fated Food” (Su 920, 928).⁶¹ Thomson punctuates his description of the harmonious hydrologic system with a repeated exclamation of perceptual achievement: “I see the rivers,” “I see the strata,” “I see the sands.” In his description of the wilderness, by contrast, Thomson’s triumphant “I see!” becomes an anxious “what?”:

But what avails this wondrous Waste of Wealth?

This gay Profusion of luxurious Bliss?

This Pomp of Nature? what their balmy Meads

Their powerful Herbs, and Ceres void of Pain? By vagrant Birds dispers’d, and wafting Winds, What their unplanted Fruits? What the cool Draughts, Th’ ambrosial Food, rich Gums, and spicy Health, Their Forests yield? Their toiling Insects what, Their silky Pride, and vegetable Robes? Ah! what avail their fatal Treasures, hid Deep in the Bowels of the pitying Earth, Golconda’s Gems, and sad Potosi’s Mines; Where dwelt the gentlest Children of the Sun? What all that Afric’s golden Rivers rowl, Her odorous Woods, and shining Ivory Stores? (Su, 860–74)

Here—in Africa—Thomson sees no chain of being bound by love or commerce, but only disconnected parts, rage, cruelty, and waste.

In the foreign wilderness of the torrid zone, Thomson’s domestic vision seems to reach its limits. At the same time, Thomson’s anxious “what?” intimates that this vision of disconnected parts may be the poet’s version of the percolation theorists’ error, his own “Amusive Dream.” For this passage echoes an earlier section of Summer, in which Thomson chides a “Critic-Fly” for “dar[ing] to tax the Structure of the Whole,” “as if Aught was form’d / In vain, or not for admirable ends”:

Shall little haughty Ignorance pronounce

His Works unwise, of which the smallest Part

Exceeds the narrow Vision of her Mind?

…………………………………………

And lives the Man, whose universal Eye

Has swept at once th’unbounded Scheme of Things;

Mark’d their Dependance so, and firm Accord,

As with unfaultering Accent to conclude

That This availeth nought? (Su, 321–33)

By looking at elements of the wild African landscape and asking of each, “what avails this?” Thomson does not simply proclaim the superiority of European civilization (though he does also do this). He also casts himself as a critic-fly, presuming to suggest that anything could “availeth nought.” There is something here of Pope’s well-known question from the Essay on Man: “Why has not Man a microscopic eye? / For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly” (1.193–94). But while Pope counsels acceptance of the bounds of human perception, Thomson brings man and fly together to worry the problem of perceptual limits. Thomson’s critic-fly falters because he sees only partially, and he sees only parts. He fails to apprehend the whole, as Thomson (unlike Pope) insists he ought. Thomson thus suggests that the problem of the torrid zone may not lie first with hyenas, serpents, and spiders, but with Thomson, and with “Man.” Unable to picture the value or role of seemingly solitary predators, Thomson fears that he might fail to perceive and to personify correctly. Like percolation theorists, he might commit an error that is at once ontological, epistemological, and rhetorical: using personification to depict solitary (and sanguinary) selves rather than to compose the social system that enables both peoples and persons to come into being, and to live harmoniously together.

This is what “wilderness” ultimately signals for Thomson: not only the outside but also the underside of his attempt to compose all of nature into one great society. The torrid zone is a site of particular trouble for Thomson, replete as it is with predators like hyenas and spiders, or with the apparent waste of a natural profusion that “availeth nought.” But for Thomson, the problem of wilderness exceeds the bounds of any geographical region, or of narrowly predatory relations. It is a notion he invokes again and again in moments when his capacity for composition strains against elements that seem to defy any vision of a harmonious domestic sphere. Such elements sometimes appear quite close to home. At the start of Summer, for example, just before the poem’s journey to the tropics, the domestic breakfast table becomes the site of Thomson’s most elaborate and also most crowded vision of nature as “one wondrous Mass / Of Animals, or Atoms organiz’d” (Su, 289–90). Here, Thomson imagines that even “the Stone / Holds Multitudes,” that fruit is inhabited by “nameless Nations,” that the air itself is filled with “unseen People” (298–99, 302, 311). According to the logic of Thomson’s expansive social harmony, this might be a positive vision—of extending domestic society to even the microscopic, atomic level. But Thomson’s system seems overwhelmed by all these people, and he notes with relief that our senses shield us from their presence:

for, if the Worlds

In Worlds inclos’d should on his Senses burst,

From Cates ambrosial, and the nectar’d Bowl,

He would abhorrent turn; and in the dead Night

When Silence sleeps o’er all, be stun’d with Noise. (Su, 313–17)

In her reading of The Seasons, Kevis Goodman suggests that the abhorrence registered in passages like this one disrupts Thomson’s ideal of one great social whole with the noise of history, the cacophony of dissonant and dissident colonial subjects on whom an imperial Britain feeds. Goodman’s reading is beautifully attuned to Thomson’s unease with eating. But it is less interested in the literal scene of leaves, fruit, and nectar than it is in the way that Thomson’s diction “renders a weird human presence.” As Goodman puts it, phrases like “‘nameless nations,’ ‘unseen people,’ the ‘inhabitants’ of the ‘winding citadel’ … [run] the reification of commodities in reverse. There are people in that food.”⁶²

Powerful as Goodman’s reading is, its emphasis on human presence occludes Thomson’s commitment to constituting all kinds of beings as nations or as peoples, parts of a social and ethical system that takes neither the human being, nor the individual person, as its foundational term. This is no easy commitment, as Thomson acknowledges in moments like this one. From the perspective of any particular animal, atom, or person—of any of the manifold eyes that compose his poem—his great domestic society looks less like a “full-adjusted Harmony of Things” and more like wilderness, a realm characterized by predation and consumption, by overwhelming and abhorrent “Noise.” Thomson does insist, in the closing “Hymn” to The Seasons, that even in “distant barbarous Climes,” “GOD is ever present”—“In the void Waste as in the City full; / And where HE vital spreads there must be Joy”—but this remains an article of faith, of what must be (“Hymn,” 101, 105–7). Nowhere in the poem does he ascend to the sort of God’s-eye view that might affirm the rightness of the social order on which he nevertheless insists. Instead, Thomson uses so many forms of personification to expose the difficult poetic labor, as well as the perceptual and ethical perplexity, that is entailed in composing a vision of the whole from necessarily individuated (if not specifically human) points of view.⁶³

One of the most intricate elaborations of what this perplexity means for Thomson comes in his depiction of a summer storm, an episode that follows immediately on the poem’s return from the African wilderness to a domestic and pastoral setting. In this episode, Thomson makes particularly complex use of personification to signal the way that “wilderness” not only impinges on seemingly innocent forms of eating, but also threatens Thomson’s ideal form of relation and movement—love. This time it is not the poet or the percolation theorist but the lover, Celadon, who errs in setting persons outside of and prior to the order of things. The scene begins not with Celadon’s error, but with a description of the storm:

Th’ unconquerable Lightning struggles thro,’

Ragged and fierce, or in red whirling Balls,

And fires the Mountains with redoubled Rage.

Black from the Stroke, above, the smouldring Pine

Stands a sad shatter’d Trunk; and, stretch’d below,

A lifeless Groupe the blasted Cattle lie:

Here the soft Flocks, with that same harmless Look

They wore alive, and ruminating still

In Fancy’s Eye; and there the frowning Bull,

And Ox half-rais’d. Struck on the castled Cliff,

The venerable Tower and spiry Fane

Resign their aged Pride. The gloomy Woods

Start at the Flash, and from their deep Recess,

Wide-flaming out, their trembling Inmates shake. (Su, 1147–60)

Thomson’s depiction of the storm begins with what seem straightforward personifications: lightning is “fierce,” it “struggles” with “Rage”; a pine tree is “sad”; flocks wear a “harmless Look”; the Bull is “frowning”; a tower and fane “Resign” their “Pride”; woods “Start.” Using personification to identify tree and cattle and tower according to the ways in which they are acted upon by lightning, Thomson might appear to call attention to the difference between such personifications and the actual human persons who appear on the scene, or, between (onto)logical objects and (onto)logical subjects. But to read the section in this way is to make the same error as Celadon commits, when he assures his beloved Amelia that she need not fear the storm because she is a “‘Stranger to Offence’” (Su, 1205). Celadon reasons that because Amelia has committed no wrong, “‘HE, who yon Skies involves / In Frowns of Darkness, ever smiles on thee, / With kind Regard’” (Su, 1206–8). At that moment, Amelia is struck dead by lightning:

From his void Embrace,

(Mysterious Heaven!) that moment, to the Ground,

A blacken’d Corse, was struck the beauteous Maid.

But who can paint the Lover, as he stood,

Pierc’d by severe Amazement, hating Life,

Speechless, and fix’d in all the Death of Woe!

So, faint Resemblance, on the Marble-Tomb,

The well-dissembled Mourner stooping stands,

For ever silent, and for ever sad. (Su, 1214–22)

In this episode, Celadon is rebuked for the same error that Thomson makes in the torrid zone: for singling out individuals, and for doing so, in Celadon’s case, out of a sense of both species and individual exceptionalism. Celadon is rebuked, that is, for thinking that human beings in general and Amelia in particular are unique—for imagining that Heaven will spare Amelia as it does not spare other creatures, even though they are also, presumably, “Stranger to Offence.” To separate Thomson’s account of the storm’s effects on human beings from his account of its effects on other kinds of things is to echo Celadon’s ironic assurance that Amelia is different from a tree or a sheep or a tower. Thomson insists that she is not.

Celadon’s error should urge us to proceed carefully when we think about the work of personification in this scene. For throughout his description of lightning and its effects, Thomson’s syntax both complicates and intensifies the work of the figure, ultimately blurring rather than shoring up the distinction between human persons and personified things. To begin, Thomson’s lines often break between subject and verb, unsettling the relation between these terms and granting a degree of independence to action: “the smouldring Pine / Stands”; “The venerable Tower and spiry Fane / Resign”; “The gloomy woods / Start.” Moreover, before something is the subject of an action, it is the object of an act of lightning (the only autonomous—because heavenly—agent in the scene): the pine is “Black from the Stroke” and “smouldring” before it “Stands”; the cattle are “blasted” before they “lie”; the tower and fane are “Struck” before they “Resign.” Similarly, Thomson presents positions before the entities that occupy them: “above” before pine, “below” before cattle, “here” before flocks, “there” before bull or ox. Throughout his description of the storm, Thomson turns syntax and line to the task of his peculiar mode of personification, using both to attribute a form of agency that is again understood not as a Cartesian capacity for response, but rather as the capacity to be moved. In doing so, he proposes a radical leveling: suggesting that what something is proceeds from what something does, that what it does proceeds from what is done to it, and finally, that what is done to it proceeds from where it is. To put this another way: Thomson uses personification in this section to elevate the identity of qualities over and against the difference of subjects, to grant sentiment and agency to pine trees, towers, and sheep, and crucially, to Amelia and to Celadon as well. Thus, as Thomson charts the effect of lightning on Amelia, he proceeds both passively and in reverse, moving from position, to action, to “the beauteous maid.” Amelia is “struck” as the tower is “Struck,” “blacken’d” as the pine is “Black”; Celadon is “sad” as the tree trunk is “sad,” “Pierc’d” as the cattle are “blasted.”⁶⁴

In this episode, Celadon is derided because he gets personification wrong, imagining that “Mysterious Heaven” acts like a person, and that persons act unlike things. In doing so, he not only mispersonifies heaven, imagining that it operates in the same manner and on the same plane as a person. He also mispersonifies Amelia, imagining that she operates in a different manner and on a different plane from a pine tree or a bull. Imagining human persons to be unique, prior to, and separable from the system that enables their individuation, Celadon enacts what Lévi-Strauss identifies as the characteristic transformation of human society:

All the members of the species Homo sapiens are logically comparable to the members of any other animal or plant species. However, social life effects a strange transformation in this system, for it encourages each biological individual to develop a personality; and this is a notion no longer recalling specimens within a variety but rather types of varieties or of species, probably not found in nature … and which could be termed “mono-individual.” What disappears with the death of a personality is a synthesis of ideas and modes of behaviour as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral species develops out of the simple chemical substances common to all species. When the loss of someone dear to us or of some public personage such as a politician or writer or artist moves us, we suffer much the same sense of irreparable privation that we should experience were Rosa centifolia to become extinct and its scent to disappear for ever.⁶⁵

For Frances Ferguson, what Lévi-Strauss describes in this passage is one version of personification: an operation that transforms persons into exclusive and irreplaceable “personalities.”⁶⁶ While Lévi-Strauss imagines that, at least in modern society, this transformation of person into personality is inevitable, Thomson wants to avoid the process of “mono-individuation” that affixes affection to any one “exclusive” personality. Apprehensive about the ethical implications of this affective exclusivity, he looks to Shaftesburian systematicity precisely for its capacity to resolve difference into equivalence, to make it possible, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, “both to define the status of persons within a group and to expand the group beyond its traditional confines.”⁶⁷ But Thomson worries, in a way that Shaftesbury does not, about love.

Love is at once the prime mover of Thomson’s great social harmony and troubling threat to his domestic vision. Thomson repeatedly calls into doubt the smooth passage from self to society imagined by moral-sense philosophers like Shaftesbury or a poet like Pope, by way of the ever-widening concentric circles of the Essay on Man, moving “from individual to the whole” to finally “Take every creature in, of every kind” (4.362, 370). Picturing a self more squarely at odds with the whole of which it is nevertheless a part, Thomson conceives social love as a “Godlike Passion,” which, “the bounds of Self / Divinely bursting, the whole Public takes / Into the Heart, enlarg’d, and burning high / With the mix’d Ardor of unnumber’d Selves” (Liberty, 3.107–10). Rather than proceed outward from the individual, proper Thomsonian love comes from without to explode the self. This is true of the Roman people, whose “generous Hearts, / Unpetrify’d by Self, so naked lay / And sensible to Truth” (Liberty, 3.207–9). It is also true of his ideal lovers, Lyttelton and Lucinda, in whom “The tender heart is animated Peace” (Sp, 941). Linked directly to the species by an impersonal, abstract organ—they are animated by “the heart” rather than by their own particular hearts—these lovers are “happiest of their Kind,” directed by “Harmony itself / Attuning all their Passions into Love” (Sp, 1113, 1118–19).

The passion that Thomson celebrates under the name of “love”—the social passion of the Roman people, or of the ideal couple—is sharply distinguished from self-love, a passion that Thomson often denominates with the Virgilian “rage,” or simply qualifies as “wild.” The most extreme instance of this sort of self-directed love in Thomson is rape or enforced marriage: the kind of love he depicts as common in those “barbarous Nations, whose inhuman Love / Is wild Desire,” where a tyrannical and predatory lover is “meanly posses’d / Of a meer, lifeless violated Form” (Sp, 1130–31, 1133–34). Thomson wants to distinguish “The cruel Raptures of the Savage Kind” from the animating passion that composes domestic and civilized society (Sp, 826). But love repeatedly threatens to slide toward what Thomson calls wilderness—love as inhuman possession, a mode of lifelessness, inanimacy, or death. Spring thus closes its celebration of domestic love with a caution to youth to “beware of Love” (983), warning that “Love deludes into … thorny Wilds” (1108). It is for such wild delusion that Thomson faults “the guileless” Celadon and Amelia: “Devoting all / To Love, each was to each a dearer Self” (Su, 1183). Celadon and Amelia may be in some sense “guileless,” but Thomson insists they are also guilty—of imagining that their guilelessness matters, that nature is a personal order, that who and what persons are is, most fundamentally, singular selves.

For Thomson, the problem is that when love personifies in this way—when it singles out what Thomson calls a “self” and Lévi-Strauss calls a “personality”—it fractures rather than binds the social whole, constricts rather than enlarges its bounds. It becomes a principle of obstruction and rupture rather than motion and composition. This is the fate not only of the barbarian tyrant-lover but of the lovesick boy, whose beloved “alone / Heard, felt, and seen, possesses every Thought, / Fills every Sense, and pants in every Vein,” and who thus sits “amid the social Band … / Lonely, and unattentive” (Sp, 1013–18). When love is fixed on one person rather than directed in and by an ever expanding whole, Thomson warns that it leaves a “Semblance of a Lover, fix’d / In melancholy Site,” a “Wretch, / Exanimate by Love” (Sp, 1022–23, 1051–52). Thomson insists that it does not matter if love is fixed on oneself or on one’s “dearer Self.” Identifying the capacity to move with the capacity to be moved, Thomson understands the self not as the seat or source of agency but as its arrest: the lovesick boy is “fix’d / In melancholy Site” just as Celadon “stood / Pierc’d … and fix’d.” As these phrases indicate, Thomson decries self-love not because it misdirects emotion, but because it cuts emotion off from direction or motion altogether. If (e)motive forces become fixed in one personality or self, then movement stops and the form of personhood that grounds Thomson’s domestic society is suspended: one is made “Exanimate by Love.”

In his remarks on love, selfhood, and wilderness, Thomson acknowledges the troubling potential of personification to transform human beings into exclusive personalities, a petrified figure, on Thomson’s view, that undoes personhood and the forms of sociability with which it is associated. This is a potential that Thomson does not entirely contain in The Seasons, but to which he does provide an alternative. This comes in the form of yet another type of personification, which seeks to avoid the production of personality by transforming human beings into allegorical personifications. Personified thus, human persons appear not as unique individuals but as types, designated by common nouns instead of proper names: “A DRAKE,” “a BACON,” “a steady MORE,” “The generous Ashley,” “The gentle Spenser” (Su, 1495, 1535, 1488, 1551, 1573). The move from Thomson’s catalog of British patriots to his roll of allegorical virtues and passions like Love and Charity is a seamless one, because for Thomson, patriots are virtues: More is “steady,” Walsingham is “frugal, and wise,” Raleigh is “active,” Russel is “temper’d,” and Algernon Sidney is “fearless” (Su, 1488, 1494, 1505, 1523, 1528). Making persons grammatically identical to personified virtues, Thomson makes the final move in a poetic system that looks to personification to both constitute and expand the bounds of society: he composes persons into peoples or kinds, as he indicates when he praises classical luminaries as “First of your Kind! Society divine!” (W, 541). To make a person a people or kind is for Thomson to render him reproducible, a motive for the movement of others: like Socrates “the Sun, / From whose white Blaze emerg’d each various Sect / Took various Teints, but with diminish’d Beam,” or like Homer, “the FOUNTAIN-BARD, / When each Poetic Stream derives its Course” (Liberty, 2.223–25, 272–73). Rather than the sexual reproduction of erotic love, it is this sort of reproduction with which Thomson is most comfortable, as more reliably working against the exanimating logic of selfhood. In The Seasons as in Liberty, then, Thomson everywhere personifies human persons in order to produce other people, casting British heroes from and as classical types: More is “Like CATO firm, like ARISTIDES just, / Like rigid CINCINNATUS nobly poor”; Algernon Sidney is “the BRITISH CASSIUS”; Bacon is “in one rich Soul, / PLATO, the STAGYRITE, and TULLY join’d” (Su, 1491–92, 1528, 1541–42). The Seasons thus composes society as a dynamic system that proceeds from periphrastic to allegorical personification: a system in which persons and personifications are collapsed and constantly producing each other.⁶⁸

Coda: Patient Persons

Throughout this chapter, I have argued that Thomson does not take the individual to be a primary ontological or even ethical term. He does, however, take individuality seriously as both an epistemological and an affective reality—one that he calls wild, and yet acknowledges at the center of his domestic vision. Thus while Thomson affirms, with Shaftesbury, that every being is fundamentally an element in some composition, he does not think that we experience ourselves (or others, at least beloved others) that way. In the end, wilderness is best understood to designate this limited or simply partial point of view: the point of view of the individual—whether human or no—that senses itself not as a part of a whole but as a particular life, even a unique personality. Thomson may be uncomfortable with the claims made from this point of view, but he does not entirely set them aside. Along with discomfort, there is sympathy for the guilelessness of Celadon and Amelia—for what it feels like to be part, or to care for one individual person. This sympathy is most powerfully expressed in The Seasons when individual persons are subject to violence at the hands of human beings.

In its own time, Thomson’s poem was probably most famous for its polemic against hunting, which centers on the personified figure of a solitary hunted stag.⁶⁹ With this figure of an acutely singular individual, we encounter a form of individuation that Thomson presents not as an ethical problem, but as a good. Thomson’s hunt scene in some ways reprises the episode of the summer storm, which ended by indicting Celadon’s personification of Amelia as an ontological and ethical error. But Thomson’s depiction of the hunt replaces divine or natural forces like heaven and lightning—which Celadon wrongly imagined to act like persons, or to care about particular personalities—by human agents, who are themselves wholly dehumanized and pictured as natural forces. In this, the hunt scene picks up on Thomson’s wider effort, in The Seasons, to fundamentally recast the nature of action, ejecting useless, self-directed, or rapacious acts from the category altogether. It is to this end that Thomson figures as an “idle Blank” the “cruel Wretch” who “squander’d vile, / Upon his scoundrel Train, what might have chear’d / A drooping Family of modest Worth”; so too the “luxurious Men” who “pass / An idle Summer-Life in Fortune’s Shine,” who “flutter on / From Toy to Toy, from Vanity to Vice” (Su, 1635–40, 346–49). Thomson depicts hunting as the exemplary case of such idleness or inaction, using the conventions of the mock-heroic to send up the lowly status not of the hunted fox but of the predatory hunter: “O glorious he, beyond / His daring Peers!” who, with a pack of “an hundred Mouths,” triumphs over one “Villain” (A, 490–93). Thomson continues his burlesque of heroic agency in his description of the post-hunt meal. He personifies all kinds of things: “the strong Table groans”; ale is “not afraid … to vie” with wine; whist “Walks his grave Round”; dice are “leaping from the Box” (A, 503, 522–27). At the same time, Thomson depicts humans sinking into stupor, and then falling asleep:

Their feeble Tongues,

Unable to take up the cumbrous Word,

Lie quite dissolv’d. Before their maudlin Eyes,

Seen dim and blue, the double Tapers dance,

Like the Sun wading thro’ the misty Sky.

Then, sliding soft, they drop.

……………………………………………

The lubber Power in filthy Triumph sits, Slumbrous, inclining still from Side to Side, And steeps them drench’d in potent Sleep till Morn. (A, 552–64)

This scene of what Thomson calls “social Slaughter” is clearly marked by the reversal of agency that Knapp identifies as the primary consequence of personification (A, 561). In Thomson, however, the combination of animate things and inanimate humans does not result from an invasion of ontological territory, as Knapp would have it: human beings are not reified because things are personified. Instead, Thomson’s human beings have themselves abdicated their claim to personhood, by operating in a mode to which Thomson denies the status of action.

This abdication occurs during the hunt, when men are cast together with dogs as a “Storm,” a “Tempest,” and an “inhuman Rout” (A, 417, 428, 439). It happens elsewhere when humans plunder a beehive, and are described as “some dread Earthquake” (A, 1205). In The Seasons, these epithets are not only figures: to an apiarian eye, human beings are “some dread Earthquake” that seizes “a proud City, populous and rich”; to the “folded Ears; unsleeping Eyes” of a hunted hare, human beings (and dogs) are not persons, but a turn in the weather: “With every Breeze she hears the coming Storm” (A, 1201, 411, 417). With these shifts in point of view, Thomson makes body parts not only the objects or the means but also the subjects of personification, granting the eyes and ears of a bee or a hare the power to dispersonify humans. It is against the backdrop of these dispersonified human beings—human beings depicted and denounced as inanimate and destructive natural forces—that Thomson personifies the hunted stag. Driven by “the Tempest,” the stag is pictured “sobbing,” recalling good times with his “Friends” and “his Loves,” relations who now abandon him as they “With selfish Care avoid a Brother’s Woe.” When the stag finally surrenders, “The big round Tears run down his dappled Face; / He groans in Anguish” (A, 428, 441–44, 448, 454–55). In various scenes of conquest, human beings who exercise what we typically think of as agency become an impersonal and inanimate force: a movement of air or of earth. By contrast, as the stag is “singled from the Herd” by a “Tempest” that pushes him forward, he becomes an individual, a singular, even psychological subject (A, 426). He becomes a person, in other words, by being a patient.

Critics have often censured Thomson for prescribing patience: for urging readers to “yet bear up a While,” assuring them that this “bounded View” will pass and disclose “The great eternal Scheme” (W, 1065, 1066, 1046). On this reading, Thomson’s vision of social harmony and his personification of human beings denies both the necessity and the possibility of action.⁷⁰ Yet Thomson aims to do something more complicated than evacuate action from his poetry and the society that it envisions. At its most challenging—from The Castle of Indolence’s allegory of the dangers of idleness, to Liberty’s effort to track the movement of a political idea through various persons and peoples, to the personifying system building that The Seasons performs—Thomson’s poetry works to conceive a social order that might include everything under the sun, and to imagine an ethics that could serve such an expanded system. In doing so, Thomson’s poetry insists that the kind of agency that we often ascribe to human persons is proper not to persons but to impersonal and divine forces like an earthquake, a tempest, or the indiscriminate and “unconquerable Lightning” (Su, 1147). Thomson advocates patience as an alternative not to action, but to this mode of agency that is structured around a subject and the objects that it necessarily acts upon: a structure that, Thomson suggests, leads inevitably to harm. Thomson advocates patience—which he alternately conceives of as passion and as animal motion or animation—as a mode of agency in which moving and being moved are impossible to parse, and a model of personhood that might harmonize the movements of all kinds of people. But he is not always hopeful, or sure. For this person is the product of often perplexing poetic labor, and it is a figure of vulnerability that is conceived against but also out of violence. In part, this is what Robinson Crusoe comes to sense during his sojourn in the wilderness: how easily the “Social Commerce” of all sorts of people can appear, to any particular person, like cannibalism. As The Seasons everywhere reminds us, wilderness surrounds.