James Thomson (1700-1748)

Tell me, thou soul

Tell me, thou soul.
[James Thomson, author of "The Seasons."]

Direct address

The poem speaks to the dead woman's soul, not about it—a rhetorical move that assumes she still exists somewhere. This isn't meditation; it's interrogation.

Tell me, thou soul of her I love,
Ah! tell me whither art thou fled;
To what delightful world above,
Appointed for the happy dead?
Or dost thou free at random roam,

Location anxiety

Two competing afterlife models: Christian heaven ('delightful world above') versus a classical wandering spirit. Thomson can't decide which cosmology to believe.

And sometimes share thy lover's woe;
Where, void of thee, his cheerless home
Can now, alas! no comfort know?
Oh! if thou hover'st round my walk,
While under every well known tree,
I to thy fancy'd shadow talk,
And every tear is full of thee;

Conditional grammar

'Should' and 'if' mark this as hypothesis, not certainty. He's constructing a scenario where grief might be answered, not claiming it will be.

Should then the weary eye of grief,
Beside some sympathetic stream,
In slumber find a short relief,
Oh visit thou my soothing dream.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Poet of The Seasons in Private Grief

James Thomson wrote The Seasons (1726-1730), the century's most influential nature poem—30,000 lines of landscape description that taught readers to see fields and weather as morally instructive. That public voice makes this private lyric stranger. Here's the man who catalogued every cloud formation in Britain, reduced to asking questions with no empirical answers.

The subtitle identifies him by his famous work, likely added by an editor to market the poem. It creates an odd effect: we're reading Thomson-the-celebrity's private loss, published for strangers. The 'thou soul' he addresses is both intimate (a dead lover) and commodified (content for readers of his fame).

We don't know who died. No biographical record confirms a great love in Thomson's life, though he never married. The poem might be conventional exercise—grief lyrics were a standard genre. But the 'cheerless home' and 'well known tree' have the specificity of actual memory, not stock phrases.

Talking to Shadows

The poem's central image: Thomson walking under trees, 'talking to thy fancy'd shadow.' 'Fancy'd' is the key word—he knows the shadow is his imagination, not her presence. The apostrophe (speaking to the absent) becomes literal: he's outside, alone, talking to nothing.

This is what grief as 'sympathetic stream' means in line 14. 'Sympathetic' here uses the 18th-century sense: a stream that responds to his emotional state, reflects it back. The natural world becomes a mirror for feeling, which is exactly what Thomson taught readers to do in *The Seasons*. But here the technique fails—nature can't answer his questions about the afterlife.

The final request is modest: not reunion, just 'visit thou my soothing dream.' He's asking for a dream-visitation, the lowest tier of supernatural contact. Even that's conditional ('should...oh visit'), wrapped in subjunctive grammar that expects nothing. It's a prayer from someone who's not sure prayer works.