Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
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