John Dyer: Quarrying Grongar Hill

Abstract

Bucknell University link between seeing and feeling, between the carnal sense of sight and the emotion, that membrane: readers used to think of it as a window, a lens--or, more active yet, Emerson's transparent eye. But what does one make of the eye when the eye, that human window, is absent, or when language stands in for the eye's faculty, if not for feeling itself? One makes a study. Or one builds a house. Hill--now known to cartographers and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales by as Welsh spelling, Grongaer--stands in Carmarthenshire, six miles east of the medieval borough of Llandeilo and between the abandoned medieval castles of Dryslwyn and Dinefwr. It was and is a hill, indeed a green hill, as the name suggests. At the crest lies the remains of an Iron Age hill fort, or so I am .assured by the ordnance survey map by Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (hereafter, RCAHMW). I was staring up into its bracken not long ago, from the ancient track that skirts the southern flank. I could have trespassed to the summit, but I didn't. John (1699-1757) had moved to the Aberglasney estate--in a dell just east of the hill--as a boy after his father Richard bought the property in 1710. He drafted Grongar in 1716 and rewrote it in 1726, several years after he'd left his family's country estate for London, in octosyllabic couplets of four cadences each. In London, and later in Rome, mostly tried to establish himself as a painter, and mostly failed. Returning to Britain, he estranged himself from some of his relations, lived on money inherited from the rest, experimented with farm schemes, got himself ordained as a minister in the Church of England, in 1741, married a woman half his age, and prospered, more or less, according to the standards of his day. In final form his signature poem runs to some 158 lines, opening Silent Nymph, with curious Eye! / Who, the purple Ev'ning, lye / On the Mountain's lonely Van. . A lot follows, although Wordsworth belatedly paused long enough to praise as a worthy kinsman. One must make allowances. was a moony teenager when he first drafted the poem, and an anxious acolyte of the English literary and artistic scene, in London and then abroad, when he rewrote it. He would go on to write a book-length vision-quest in verse about sheep farming entitled Fleece. As Wikipedia helpfully explains, The Reece is a four-book blank-verse Georgic poem dealing with the tending of sheep, the shearing and preparation of the wool, weaving, and trade in woolen manufactures. 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. Fleece failed to gain recognition. Indeed. Samuel Johnson sums up the case well when he notes Dyer is not a poet of bulk or dignity sufficient to require an elaborate criticism, in spite of his most famous poem. When I visited Hill it was autumn: dark, wet, and dank. Aberglasney, the erstwhile estate, had a checkered subsequent history; it was abandoned in the 1950s and allowed to settle into advanced decay before volunteers and an American-funded trust began restoring both the house and its famous gardens, renowned as far back as 1477, when another Welsh poet, Lewis Glyn Cothi, had praised them. track to Hill threads past what had been the service range of the estate towards Farm, once a dependency of the estate but subsequently set off and sold to a tenant. It's still a working farm, and it's private property. Allowing for the rise and fall of oaks, most of the views from Aberglasney's celebrated gardens, which John also memorialized, in The Country Walk, seem designed not to enable views of the hill, but to block the prospect. …