James Thomson has been called the ‘characteristic Miltonic poet of the eighteenth century’. His ‘indebtedness [to Milton] is a commonplace’, but identifying the Miltonic quality of The Seasons is difficult and must pursue subtle lines of connection. I propose that Milton’s use of the long poem to explore the role of God either as a first, original cause or as an immanent, immediate cause, and his use of the prospect poem framework to hold these two possibilities in suspension has implications for the development of the long poem in the eighteenth century, for the emergent popularity of non-narrative genres and for Thomson’s own treatment of time in The Seasons.

I begin by outlining what I take to be the key intellectual historical and generic contexts for Thomson’s thinking about time: the contemporary debate over the capacity of natural philosophy to identify ‘secondary’ causes within nature, without recourse to the ‘first cause’ of God; and the fashionable georgic mode that offered a model for writing about time as at once a continuous process and a succession of disjointed, isolated moments. This is followed by a discussion of how Thomson’s temporality manifests at the level of content, in his more overtly georgic passages as well as in exemplary passages of natural description. In the next chapter I will consider two variations on Thomson’s usual subject of natural description, both of which seem to demand a more clearly linear apprehension of time: the interpolated tales, and the depictions of the poet in the process of composition. I will argue that these parts, too, are structured so as to give a sense of movement, but to question the straightforward and continuous direction of that movement. In the final chapter of this section, as I did with Paradise Lost in Chapter 3, I turn to the reader’s experience of time as it is shaped by the poem’s structure.

Readers over three centuries have disagreed over whether The Seasons behaves as an ‘unfolding’ timeline or as a space or picturesque canvas in which to wander and from which to extract.