sitting careless on a granary floor
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,
or the couplet in which Coleridge brings before us a subtle suggestion of the spring beauty, to which the storms and snows are but a prelude:
And winter, slumbering in the open air
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring.
(“Work without Hope”)
Yet Thomson, as might be expected in a forerunner of the Romantic school, is not altogether without a gift for these embryonic personifications, as they have been called, when by means of a felicitous term or epithet the whole conception which the poet has in mind is suddenly galvanized into life and endowed with human feelings and emotions. Such evocations are of the very stuff of which poetry is made, and at their highest they possess the supreme power of stirring or awakening in the mind of the reader other pictures or visions than those suggested by the mere personification.[207]
Though some of Thomson’s instances are conventional or commonplace, as in the description of
the grey grown oaks
That the calm village in their verdant arms