Turn, turn, turn

There were no seasons in Paradise. Even in the Golden Age of classical mythology -- when, under the care of the harvest god Saturn, the Earth itself, untouched by hoe or ploughshare, yielded an ample sufficiency of everything -- the Roman poet Ovid tells us ver erat aeternum: Spring was everlasting. And so it was, implicitly, in Eden: Renaissance poets, conflating the two in various visions of an earthly paradise, delighted in elaborating on this. Spenser, for example, has it that in his Garden of Adonis,

There is continuall spring, and harvest there

Continuall, both meeting at one time:

For both the boughes doe laughing blossomes beare,

And with fresh colours decke the wanton Prime,

And eke attonce the heavy trees they clime,

Which seeme to labour under their fruits lode:

The whiles the ioyous birdes make their pastime

Emongst the shadie leaves, their sweet abode,

And their true loves without suspition tell abrode.

Blossoming and fruiting occur together, without even the pleasurable delay of a summer season between them. (Citrus trees, on which these may occur simultaneously, had a whiff of the terrestrial-paradisiacal about them for Northern Europeans in the Renaissance and after.) There were no vicissitudes of winter to be got through before there was spring again.

But with the end of Saturn’s reign and the dawn of the Silver Age, or, in the biblical interpretation, with the fall of man and the displacement of perfection by the world of nature, the seasonal cycle took its dominion over our world. Even in tropical regions deemed to be quasi-paradisiacal by dwellers in temperate zones, there is a rainy season and a dry one. The periods of the solstices and equinoxes are an astronomical fact, breeding a host of consequent terrestrial facts as well.

The ancient Greek word that we translate as “season” was hora, and it means any regularly recurring period of time. The Latin tempus obviously has a similar generality in the matter of time, and the German Jahreszeit means “time of year.” But it is in English -- as in the Romance languages from which our word “season” derives -- that a particular season is singled out by the ultimate Latin root of the word meaning “to sow seed,” thus seeming to privilege spring as that season.

But the very act of naming four seasons of the year and associating them mythologically and, eventually, conceptually with other tetrads (or groups of four phases or divisions) results in names that can seem to be part of nature rather than what they are: a contrivance of our culture. One has only to think, for example, of the shifting of patterns of renewal and decay that occurred when the Julian calendar -- with its new year starting at the vernal equinox -- was replaced in England and the American colonies in 1752 by our present Gregorian one, with its new year buried in the darkness of the winter solstice.

Michael Kammen, a cultural historian of American life, has explored the facts and the significances of the seasons as well as their different kinds of intertwining in the history of American consciousness in an ambitious, impressive and convincingly organized book that is profusely illustrated. “A Time to Every Purpose” -- the title points to Ecclesiastes’ “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose” -- deals in an exemplary way with the American seasons.

Kammen considers the seasons as treated, interpreted, celebrated, exploited and otherwise experienced -- in American art, literature and popular culture from the 18th century to the present -- in a knowledgeable way that leaves the reader undaunted. Appropriately conversant with the British poetry that influenced American writing, his book is written in a style that is considered, lively and free from academic jargon. In the course of this study, he touches on a good deal of writing and visual art, both cultivated and popular, and traces representations of the seasons and their interrelations in image and discourse through a number of social and cultural issues. He remains continually interested in the interplay of metaphors characterizing the seasons and those adducing seasonal character to other aspects of life.

Early in the book, Kammen rightly directs our attention to the famous sonnet of Keats that begins “Four seasons fill the measure of the year, / Four seasons are there in the mind of man,” which connects not -- as it obviously might, and as Ovid indeed did -- stages of human life with the planetary cycle and vice versa but rather four modes or conditions of thought. We might think of Kammen’s entire book as presenting a view of “the cultural seasons” with particular regard to what has come to be called, in academic palaver, the social construction of the seasonal cycle.

Kammen turns his investigation to a brief but useful introduction to what he calls “the Circle of the Seasons as a Persistent Trope.” He then proceeds to map its history in the West in a concise fashion, from classical antiquity up to the 18th century and from poetic mythography to the point at which detailed observation, both in art and literature, starts becoming an aesthetic and even a moral occasion. He ends this survey with a discussion of James Thomson’s celebrated blank-verse poem, “The Seasons” (1730), and its wide influence.

Following this, Kammen takes up the matter of the seasonal cycle in American life and writing, for which, in the 18th century, Thomson’s poem remained an important text. Subsequent chapters deal not only with historical periods and cultural modalities but with an engaging array of topical and thematic issues, including the experience of seasonal change among African American slaves, the interpretation of them in Native American cultures, issues arising from urbanization -- including seasonality in city life and its representations, the rise of sentimental attitudes toward the seasons and printed calendars and almanacs. His chapter on the emergence of a certain kind of urbane “nature writing” is particularly good, ranging from John Burroughs in the late 19th century to the contemporary Verlyn Klinkenborg.

A considerable amount of painting and graphic art of the 19th and 20th centuries is invoked -- and often reproduced -- throughout the volume. Given the history of important American art since the Armory Show in 1913, most of the landscape or allegorical figure painting from 1950 and on that we are shown is, unfortunately, the work of rather inferior illustrative pictorialists. But Kammen does give us some detailed readings of Jasper Johns’ “The Seasons” of the later 1980s.

Another exception is Kammen’s consideration of James McGarrell’s wonderful sequence of seasonal mural paintings covering the walls of the dining room of the painter’s house in Vermont. But he seems to miss a significant point about the sequence -- namely, that there is a culinary agenda through which the seasonal cycle is interpreted and which determines so much of the iconography. (In another case, referring to a full-grown longhair cat as a kitten in a painting by Paul Cadmus is an error of an obvious but more trivial sort.) Yet Kammen can also be very revealing about the more imaginative art and literature he considers. He observes that for painters and poets a seasonal group may often have started out as a single seasonal motif or occasion -- only after completion did it seem to demand of its maker the company of its companions, surrounding, supporting, interpreting.

Given the wide range of quotation throughout “A Time to Every Purpose,” the reader may often feel that there were some surprising omissions, and I hope it may not seem churlish to note a few. John Greenleaf Whittier’s remarkable and beautiful “Snowbound” should certainly have been considered, and in quoting the Keats sonnet, Kammen seems not to notice how it illustrates a point he himself makes about a common literary preference for the autumnal: Keats gives two lines each to spring and winter, three and a half to summer and four and a half to autumn.

Shakespeare’s autumnal sonnet, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” with its associated tropes of autumn, sunset and glowing embers is unfortunately absent (although Kammen observes that autumn is more intriguingly problematic in its defined character and perhaps remains thereby a favorite season for many writers). Keats’ “To Autumn” is a great canonical instance of analyzing a season into subsidiary phases and, although its first line is quoted, one might wish that the poem’s own analysis of the season’s component stages had been noted. Richard Lewis’ “A Journey From Patapsco in Maryland to Annapolis, April 4, 1730” is a significant work that is overlooked: Here, an April day becomes as metonymic of spring itself as it does in the opening lines of the “General Prologue” to “The Canterbury Tales” -- indeed, it tempts one to want to treat spring, as Keats does autumn, in terms of April-spring, May-spring and June-spring.

On almanacs, Kammen is quite informative, though I wish he had noted Elizabeth Bishop’s wonderful and celebrated “Sestina,” with its seasonally ambiguous “equinoctial rain” falling on a saddened house, creating a new season of its own, a “ ‘Time to plant tears,’ says the almanac.” Kammen does better, in fact, with his examples of prose and of 18th and 19th century poetry than he does with later poetry. His discussion of Wallace Stevens’ beautiful but difficult “The Snow Man,” with its claim that it takes “a mind of winter” not to obscure the cold landscape with sentimentality, will not please those with knowledge of that great poet’s work. By winter in this poem, Stevens invokes a condition of consciousness necessary for the imagination to operate.

In a more poetically modest sense, we might all wonder for ourselves what, say, “a mind of fall” might be like: Certainly we all learn to feel from childhood a paradoxical sense of a new year starting with the autumnal equinox. This aspect of fall arose in 19th and 20th century America with the importance of the educational new year. After a long vacation, schools resume again in the late summer or early autumn: It is a cycle imprinted on our earliest memories, and September renewal feels almost as “natural” as the weather. (As a child of the northeastern United States, I recall, too, a feeling that to call the two solstices “midsummer” and “midwinter” was somehow artificial, and that the “natural” referents of those terms were really the midpoints of our year’s warmest and coldest stretches at the end of July and the end of February, respectively.)

Kammen’s book invites us to consider our own very personal senses of each season, mapping them on and against our different modes of national discourse about them. He shows their individuality and how their sequence is a kind of square dance, and, on the other hand, shows the power of their fluidity and the way they run into one another. Handsome and absorbing, “A Time to Every Purpose” is considerably successful in its exploration, offering to readers the likelihood that they will never regard the calendar in the same way again. *