Grongar Hill
The Ordnance Survey reference is SN573215 / Sheet: 159 and the co-ordinates are latitude 51° 52' 23.85" N and longitude 4° 4' 23.17" W.[1] Its name derives from the Iron Age hillfort on its summit, in Welsh gron gaer (circular fort).
Instead they are made an emotional image and given Gothic properties: 'Tis now the Raven's bleak Abode; 'Tis now th'Apartment of the Toad; And there the Fox securely feeds; And there the pois'nous Adder breeds, Conceal'd in Ruins, Moss and Weeds:[9] From this contrast with their former glory, the poet says that he learns to modify his desires and be content with the simple happiness that his presence on the hill brought in the past and continues to do.
As a vista, with the abrupt ascent rising from the river in the foreground, leading to a view of distant towers, it approximates more closely to Rosa's "Mountain Landscape", now in Southampton Art Gallery.
For William Wordsworth, in his sonnet addressed to the poet,[15] Dyer is rescued from the fashionable preference formerly given unworthier models by his ability to conjure up “a living landscape” that will ultimately be remembered "Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill."
"[16] Among the other poems by Dyer that accompanied the first appearance of "Grongar Hill" in Savage's miscellany was his epistle to his teacher Jonathan Richardson, "To a Famous Painter", in which he modestly confessed that “As yet I but in verse can paint”.
In his textbook Instructions for Drawing and Colouring Landscapes (London, 1805), Edward Dayes returned to the same description of trees downhill that Gilpin cites as a correct middle ground.
Though perhaps "it is too much detailed for any mass in a picture" in itself, he finds it commendable nevertheless as illustrating the principle that diversification of form and colour is needed in painting "to prevent monotony".
It is not the objection of a man of moral sensibility; for who would sacrifice for a technicism of art those specialities which ... prepare us for one of the most touching applications in English poetry; for which, be it observed, had we been kept at a distance, according to the rules of perspective, we should not have been sufficiently interested spectators.
"How different the estimation of an extensive prospect that suggested the beautiful reflections of the poet" in the passage beginning “See on the mountain's southern side" (lines 114–28).
For Barrell the poetic effects are random and the sense of place is disrupted by the way that "the eighteenth century poet is forever interrupting his scene-painting to find its moral or emotional analogue".
"[22] Later still, Rachel Trickett exposed the "innate absurdity" of the supposition "that the technique Dyer acquired as a painter could be reproduced with a kind of transliterated accuracy in language."
Furthermore, it is a legitimate part of the poet's role to comment and "Dyer does in fact make a distinction between the visual and the perceptual by separating his passages of description and of moralizing".
[24] Later Combe was to avenge William Gilpin's insult to Dyer's poem by caricaturing his work in The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque.
[25] Another youthful tribute to Dyer's poem occurs at the start of Coleridge's undergraduate squib “Inside the coach” (1791), which parodies the opening lines.
Although the poem was frequently anthologised, it did not appear as an individual work (apart from in the Welsh duoglott translation) until the scholarly edition of C. Boys Richard (Johns Hopkins Press, 1941).
This was accompanied by a topographically incorrect woodcut taken from Dodsley's 1761 collection of Dyer's poems showing a riverside mansion at the steep foot of a castled hill.
[35] The Piper print was also redeployed as the CD cover of a setting of Dyer's words by the Welsh composer Alun Hoddinott, who knew the area well in his youth.
