Platonic Ideals and Audiences in The Seasons

Today's Notes from the Ivory Tower are getting pulled from 18th Century Poetry and College Composition Pedagogy. These notes are coming to you in direct preparation for a grad school essay,  so bear with me for some rambling thoughts through The Seasons with lightning bolts from Plato and pedagogical theory.

"Why endeavor after a long Poem?  To which I should answer—Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading?"

                       - John Keats, on the Long Poem

Thomson's The Seasons is a very, very long poem.  It's around four thousand lines, in four sections. Obviously it's a bit much to focus on the entire poem, so we'll be focusing on the language that Thomson uses to speak to his audiences. I'll be using Ede and Lunsford's article discussing audiences, so for those of you who aren't familiar with the concepts of audience addressed/audience invoked, the article is linked here.

Thomson's Audiences

• Audience Addressed: In Thomson's case, the addressed audience is literally addressed in the poem. He names Frederic, Prince of Wales and numerous patrons and friends in the openings and bodies of the four sections. In the case of naming the Prince and his patrons, Thomson is making very obvious political moves. He's basically flagged the poem with big names, the way designer perfumes have names like Justin Beiber, Taylor Swift and Mark Jacobs on them. It's old-school poetic street cred for Thomson. That street cred comes with strings attached, however. You do not want to publish views with which your patron or, god forbid, the Heir Apparent disagrees with.
• Audience Invoked: The invoked audience is basically the audience that the writer (in this case, Thomson) had in their heads when they were writing. Thomson seems to have had everyone and no one in his head when he began writing. He is clearly drawing from Newton at times in the poem, and the body of the text is thick with classical allusions. This would suggest a wealthy, well-read audience. Thomson also (in keeping with the genre of Georgics) gives his readers extended images of swains going about their humble, rural lifestyle. That suggests an entirely different type of audience.

Once the question of Audience is thoroughly snarled, Thomson throws in these Personified Abstractions. And by that I mean we can finish a section of the poem where Thomson has just explained that light refracting through water causes rainbows, or a poet sits down by the fire in winter to think about heroes, and suddenly Anger or Melancholy walks in the room to vent.

Plato's hierarchy of Forms dictates that we have the single ideal form of something, and anything else in the world that we call, say, anger, is a mere shadow of the Ideal. Thomson would appear to have the Ideal walking into the room, which is of course going to affect the audience, be that audience addressed or invoked.

Let's look at some semi-problematic quotes now, shall we?

 

Assuming that's not too small to read, let's unpack that 13 or so lines. Thomson openly references Newton and the newly understood scientific theories of the time regarding the formation of a rainbow. Specifically, the words "Prism", "refracted" and "proportion" are used, which are all quite Latinate terms that would have been associated with an educated (read 'wealthy') audience.

 

In contrast to the science, however, we have the swain wandering in the field to find the end of the rainbow. This sections reads like a ekphrasis of  the scene in Fantasia after Zeus finishes playing darts with lighting bolts. Everyone is entwining with the rainbow in pure ecstasy.

 

So thus we have a tension in the poem in terms of the audience. The question must be asked: is Thomson being intentionally condescending to the swains among the readership? Or is he rebuking (however gently) the wealthy, educated readers for losing a sense of appreciation and wonder for the world? 

These aren't questions that get answered lightly, and the language is very carefully chosen so that it can be seen as innocuous. 'Swain', for instance, has no adjective attached to it, so the reader isn't being cued by Thomson one way or the other.

Here's the second quote to examine:

Oh good, that's a bit easier to read. This is one of Thomson's Personified Abstractions; Anger has just entered the building, folks.

It seems pretty simple at the outset. The highest Platonic Ideal of anger walks into a bar. So what's the punch line? Well, it would seem (if we follow Thomson's train of thought through the next 28 lines or so, which all readers might not have done, due to skip and dip reading habits in the 18th Century) to be... Something. You got me on this one, Thomson. Anger walks into a bar and then walks right back out again after 28 lines.

Contradictions and Personified abstractions are rife throughout The Seasons; the above quotes are simply two examples taken out of "Spring". The other three sections of the poem are filled with equally contradictory language and personifications, linked together by long list of everything in the world (If you think I'm exaggerating, by all means read the poem. If you get through all of it, good on you! You've read a list of everything in the world.).

Hopefully (although I'm not honestly holding out THAT much hope) you enjoyed these Notes from the Ivory Tower, and if not, we'll be back next time with something a little less dry and dusty. Maybe with more videos too!