DYER, JOHN

(baptized Aug. 13, 1699, Aberglasney, Carmarthenshire, Walesd. December 1757, Coningsby, Lincolnshire, Eng.), British poet chiefly remembered for Grongar Hill (1726), a short descriptive and meditative poem, in the manner of Alexander Pope's Windsor-Forest, in which he portrays the countryside largely in terms of classical landscape. The poet describes the view from a hill overlooking the vale of Towy and uses this as a starting point for meditation on the human lot: A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter's day, Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave. Dyer's longest poem, The Fleece (1757), a blank-verse poem on the subject of tending sheep, is a typically 18th-century attempt to imitate Virgil's Georgics. Dyer also wrote The Ruins of Rome (1740), which again combines description and meditation.