John Dyer

John Dyer (1699-1758), from “The Poems of Mark Akenside and John Dyer, 1855. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Rev. John Dyer (1699 - 24 July 1758) was a Welsh poet and painter, who became a clergyman of the Church of England.

Life

Overview

Dyer was born in Caermarthenshire. In his early years he studied painting, but finding that he was not likely to attain a satisfactory measure of success, entered the Church. He has a definite, if a modest, place in literature as the author of 3 poems, Grongar Hill (1727), The Ruins of Rome (1740), and The Fleece (1757). The earliest of these is the best, and the best known, and contains much true natural description; but all have passages of considerable poetical merit, delicacy and precision of phrase being their most noticeable characteristic. Wordsworth had a high opinion of Dyer as a poet, and addressed a sonnet to him.

He is most recognized for Wordsworth’s sonnet, To The Poet, John Dyer, and for Grongar Hill, one of Dyer’s 6 early poems featured in Richard Savage’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations by Several Hands (February 1726), a collection of works featuring ‘Hillarian’ circle verse..

Youth

Dyer, the son of a solicitor, was born in 1699 or 1700 at Aberglasney, in Carmarthenshire. He was sent to Westminster School and was destined for the law, but on his father’s death he began to study painting. He wandered about South Wales, sketching and occasionally painting portraits.

Career

In 1726 his 1st poem, "Grongar Hill," appeared in a miscellany published by poet Richard Savage. It was an irregular ode in the so-called Pindaric style, but Dyer entirely rewrote it into a loose measure of 4 cadences, and printed it separately in 1727. It had an immediate and brilliant success.

A visit to Italy bore fruit in The Ruins of Rome (1740), a descriptive piece in about 600 lines of Miltonic blank verse.

Dyer was ordained a priest in 1741, and held successively the livings of Calthorp in Leicestershire, Belchford (1751), Coningsby (1752), and Kirby-on-Bane (1756), the last 3being Lincolnshire parishes. In 1741 he married a Miss Ensor, said to be descended from the brother of Shakespeare.

In 1757 he published his longest work, the didactic blank-verse epic of The Fleece, in 4 books, discoursing of the tending of sheep, of the shearing and preparation of the wool, of weaving, and of trade in woollen manufactures. The town took no interest in it, and Dodsley facetiously prophesied that “Mr Dyer would be buried in woollen.”

He died at Coningsby of consumption, on the 15th of December 1758.

Writing

"Grongar Hill"

"Grongar Hill" was Dyer’s first published work (originally appearing in Richard Savage’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations by Several Hands 1726) written in irregular ode in Pindaric style about Dyer’s study of nature and as a tribute to his ancestral familial Wales estate. In the same year, after having received much acclaim, Dyer rewrote the piece in a loose measure of 4 cadences in octosyllabic couplets like Milton’s L’Allegro or Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest.

Grongar Hill, as it now stands, is a short poem of only 150 lines, describing in language of much freshness and picturesque charm the view from a hill overlooking the poet’s native vale of Towy. The rhymes and grammar uncertain but this was his best and most recognized work that captured the style of Romanticism. Like his fascination and background in landscape paintings, Dyer worked outside of the trend of political oriented work and focused his concerns with the countryside landscape of his time – namely the colors and visual perspective as a trained painter, thus as a landscape poet.

The Ruins of Rome

The Ruins of Rome was a less successful descriptive poem in 545 lines of Miltonic blank verse, chronicling the disappointing natural scenery of the naked Italian mountains and muddy rivers, as written in the opening lines. Dyer writes as a historical poet but lacks generality and emotion. Belinda Humfrey simplifies the structure of Grongar Hill and The Ruins of Rome relating the narrative structures of both poems. She writes, “There is a climb to the top of a hill with reflections on the way and then, on reaching the top, a survey of the scenery all around, accompanied by some crowning reflections.”

The Fleece

The Fleece was written in 4 books and was a didactic Georgic blank-verse epic dealing with the tending of sheep, the shearing and preparation of the wool, weaving, and trade in woolen manufactures. The epic was written in a lofty manner, inclusive of a moral and patriotic material for the point is made that England has a respect for trade and consequently prospers. On a more personal level, he reflects on the benefits that trade will bring to him. The Fleece failed to gain recognition.

Critical introduction

by Edward Dowden

"The subject of the Fleece, sir, cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets?" So, in his way of prompt finality, pronounced Johnson the dictator. Yet Akenside, whose poetical aims were sufficiently remote from the common, had declared that he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer’s Fleece; "if that were ill received he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." Gray ventured to brave the elegant disdain of Horace Walpole by affirming that "Mr. Dyer has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number." And one in our own century, of loftier genius than Gray, looking back from his Westmoreland solitudes to his humbler brother poet among the Cambrian hills, has left his protest against the injustice of ‘hasty Fame’ in her neglect of Dyer:

‘Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still,

A grateful few shall love thy modest Lay,

Long as the shepherd’s bleating flock shall stray

O’er naked Snowdon’s wide aerial waste,

Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill.’

The power of hills was not on Johnson; Fleet Street, with its roar, had more music for his ear than the piping of a thrush or the tender clamour of the mother-ewes.

"Grongar Hill," and "The Country Walk," appeared in Poetical Miscellanies of the year 1726, the same year that saw the publication of Thomson’s Winter. It was the year in which Pope was imagining his goddess of Dulness, as she surveyed through fog her long succession of Grub Street children. From remote Scotland and from Southern Wales came a gift to English poetry which neither Grub Street nor Twickenham could bestow. While Pope, a paladin in ruffles and periwig, was doing to death by exquisite rapier-thrusts the swarming hosts of Dulness, his own position was threatened unawares. That poetry of external nature which was to alienate for a season the general heart from such poetry as his, was already inaugurated by the youthful singers of Winter and of Grongar Hill.

Dyer had been for a time pupil to the painter Richardson, and master and pupil may have laid down their brushes now and again to con over some passage of Milton, whom they both knew well and honoured. In Dyer’s love of landscape there is something of the painter’s feeling; he loves a wide prospect, diversified by stream and wood, backed by blue aërial steeps ‘solemnly vast’; the effect is heightened if the landscape include the ragged walls of some crumbling castle, or some peasant’s smoky nest leaning against its gnarled tree. There remains but to add a human figure or two — an old man white-bearded, in weed ragged and brown, leaning on his spade in the little garden, or a fisher in the willow shade,

‘Who with the angle in his hand

Swings the nibbling fry to land.’

The poetry of ruins was not reserved for the romantic second half of the century. It is Dyer who describes

‘The spacious plain

Of Sarum, spread like ocean’s boundless round,

Where solitary Stonehenge grey with moss,

Ruin of ages, nods.’

And Johnson could not withhold his admiration from some lines conceived among Rome’s ‘dilapidating edifices.’

‘The Pilgrim oft

At dead of night, mid his oraison hears

Aghast the voice of time, disparting towers,

Tumbling all precipitate down dash’d,

Rattling around loud thundering to the moon.’

But Dyer, as even these lines show, is not a painter who would constrain words to be the medium of his art; he is a poet. He has a heart that listens, an eye that loves; his landscape is full of living change, of tender incident, of the melody of breeze and bird and stream. Here under glossy-rinded beeches ‘the burrowing rabbit turns the dust’; here the new-dropped lamb,

‘Tottering with weakness by his mother’s side

Feels the fresh world about him’;

here the husbandman returning at eve to his "little smiling cottage warm embowered," meets his rosy children at the door,

‘Prattling their welcomes, and his honest wife,

With good brown cake and bacon slice, intent

To cheer his hunger after labour hard.’

Dyer loves solitary musing on some gentle hillside, and sometimes moralises amiably on the gains of a private life remote from men;

‘Grass and flowers Quiet treads.’

But it is one of his distinctions that he never really opposed nature and human society, as poets of Rousseau’s part of the century were wont to oppose them; and he not only pays homage to trade in the way of easy platitudes, but really receives thrills of poetic excitement from the life of man in commerce, its force, its vividness, its picturesqueness, its variety. ‘’Tis art and toil,’ he exclaims, ‘give nature value.’ Could he choose his lot it would be on some healthful waste, ‘far from a Lord’s loath’d neighbourhood’; yet he would not be neighbourless, for he loves his toiling fellow-men, and if the soil were coarse and sterile, it should be so only ‘till forced to flourish and subdued by me.’

The farmer still collecting his scattered sheaves under the full-orbed harvest moon, the strong-armed rustic plunging in the flood an unshorn ewe, the carter on the dusty road beside his nodding wain, the maiden at her humming wheel, delight Dyer’s imagination no more than do the Sheffield smiths near the glaring mass ‘clattering their heavy hammers down by turns,’ the builder, trowel in hand, at whose spell Manchester rises and spreads like Carthage before the eyes of Æneas, the keen-eyed factor inspecting his bales, the bending porter on the wharf where masts crowd thick. The poet’s ancestors, as he is pleased to record in verse, were weavers, who, flying from the rage of superstition, brought the loom to

‘that soft tract

Of Cambria, deep-embayed, Dimetian land,

By green hills fenced, by ocean’s murmur lull’d.’

From them he obtained a goodly heritage — his love of freedom and his love of industry. He honored traffic, the "friend to wedded love"; he honoured England for her independence and her mighty toil; America, for her vast possibilities of well-being. He pleaded against the horrors of the slave trade. He courted the favour of no lord. And, in an age of city poets, he found his inspiration on the hillside and by the stream.

Recognition

His poems were collected by Dodsley in 1770, and by Edward Thomas in 1903 for the Welsh Library, vol. iv.

Thomas Gray was an admirer, once writing to Horace Walpole that Dyer "has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.”

Publications

• The Ruins of Rome: A poem. London: Lawton Gilliver, 1740.
• The Fleece: A poem, in four books. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757.
• Poems. London: John Hughes for R. & J. Dodsley, 1761;
  • {facsimile edition), Menston, UK: Scolar Pres, 1971.
• The Poetical Works. Edinburgh: Apollo Press, by the Martins, 1779.
• Grongar Hill: A duoglott poem (bilingual, with Welsh translation by Thomas Davies). Llandovery, Wales, UK: D.R. & W. Rees, 1832.
  • Grongar Hill (edited by Richard C. Boys). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941
  • Grongar Hill (with woodcuts by Pamela Hughes). Cambridge, UK: Golden Head Press, 1963.
• The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside and John Dyer (with Mark Akenside; edited by Robert Aris Willmott & Myles Birket Foster). London: Routledge, 1855.
• The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer, and Green (with John Armstrong & Matthew Green); edited by George Gilfillan). Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1858.
• The Poems of John Dyer (edited by Edward Thomas). London: T.F. Unwin, 1903.

Anthologized

• Miscellaneous Poems and Translations: By several hands (edited by Richard Savage). London: Samuel Chapman, 1726.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Dyer, John". Encyclopædia Britannica. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 755. . Wikisource, Web, Jan. 9, 2017.
• Saintsbury, George. "Dyer." Short History of English Literature. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1960. 572. Print.

External links

Poems

• Dyer in The English Poets: An anthology: "Grongar Hill," Extract from The Fleece, Book I
• John Dyer at Poetry Nook (25 poems)

About

• John Dyer in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• "A Minor Poet and His Longest Poem: John Dyer and The Fleece" at PopMatters
• Dyer, John in the Dictionary of National Biography
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.. Original article is at

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Dyer,_John