‘Can Pure Description Hold the Place of Sense?’: Thomson's Landscape Poetry

Summary

The Limits of Description

It all depends what one means by ‘pure description’. The phrase, of course, is Pope's, a self-deprecating nod in the direction of the early pastoral poetry he wrote before he learnt to moralize his song:

Soft were my Numbers, who could take offence

While pure Description held the place of Sense?

Warburton, in his notes on these lines from the Epistle to Arbuthnot, drew attention to the equivocal meaning of the adjective ‘pure’, as signifying ‘either chaste or empty’. Is the poet's stooping to truth a fall from the chastity of innocence to the sensuality of experience? Or is his growth into maturity marked by a change from the vacuity of ignorance to the plenitude of experience? Warburton himself resolves the ambiguity by indulging in a sensory parallel appropriate for the gourmet Pope:

[Pope] has given in this line what he esteemed the true Character of descriptive poetry, as it is called. A composition, in his opinion, as absurd as a feast made up of sauces. The use of a pictoresque imagination is to brighten and adorn good sense; so that to employ it only in description, is like childrens [sic] delighting in a prism for the sake of its gaudy colours; which when frugally managed, and artfully disposed, might be made to represent and illustrate the noblest objects in nature.

Description, then, is the concern of those who, knowing no better, are content to feast on the tinsel and glitter of immature imagination.