Image Making in James Thomson’s The Seasons

Abstract

Rather than focus on the examination of James Thomson’s poetic description in The Seasons , this essay investigates the poet’s image-making processes in the anthropocentric interpolated episodes of Celadon and Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Palemon and Lavinia, and the story of the Perishing Man. It examines the capacity of Thomson’s different types of multidimensional images to convey moments of stasis and mobility, concentration and process, as well as stagnation and petrifaction. Thomson’s images are inscribed with spatial and temporal matrices in order to create different patterns of variety that underpin his complex poetics of action and description.