Scottish Authors > James Thomson ("B.V.") Poet 1834-1882

James Thomson was one of the most influential British poets, yet there is no significant writer, before or since, more disparaged. John Veitch in The Feeling for nature in Scottish poetry offered an explanation for this paradox by pointing out that English was not his native language, but a foreign language which he had to acquire. Thomson's seminal work, The Seasons (1726-30, revised 1744), is a laboured and uneasy epic poem, yet it is considered to be the first substantial poem in English to have Nature, or, perhaps, the landscape, as its main subject. Thomson is, properly, credited by historians of the Picturesque, with occupying a position analogous to that of Claude or Poussin in painting. The Seasons is said to have inspired Turner, and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Haydn used a translation of The Seasons as text for his oratorio Die Jahreszeiten.

Thomson was probably born in Ednam, Roxburghshire in 1700, the son of a minister, but he was taken as a babe in arms to the parish of Southdean in a remote fold in the wild hill country under Carter Bar where he was brought up, and of which he may well have been thinking when he celebrated:

Rough rugged rocks, wet marshes, ruined towers,

Bare trees, brown brakes, bleak heaths, and rushy moors

He was educated - reluctantly it is said - at the University of Edinburgh. He published poetry there, but left university early and made his way to London. Thomson was best known in his own lifetime as a dramatist.

Although The Seasons was written in London, it undoubtedly owes much to his boyhood:

... in my cheerful morn of life,

When nursed by careless solitude I lives,

And sung of Nature with unceasing joy,

Pleased have I wandered through you rough domain

Other influences from Scotland occur in The Seasons. There are significant echoes of Gavin Douglas, of Robert Henryson and, in the following passage, of Alexander Hume:

... Gradual sinks the breeze

Into a perfect calm, that not a breath

Is heard to quiver through the closing woods

Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves

Of aspen tall ...

Most authorities regard The Castle of Indolence (1748) as his finest work; it consists of cantos in Spenserian verse about the pleasures and pitfalls of idleness in which Thomson was something of an expert, eventually occupying a sinecure, rather than having to rely on real work. In 1748, he died in Richmond and is buried there. Among his other writings are the poem Liberty (1734-36), and a number of plays. The masque Alfred (1740), written with Mallet, contains Arne's famous song Rule Britannia. Thomson probably wrote the lyrics. It is for this reason that he is commemorated by a tall, rather unsightly, obelisk in Ednam.

Louis Stott

Search Scotland's Culture for more by & about this author. Link will open in a new window.