7 - ‘Soil and clime’

Summary

Pastoral landscapes

Dyer's shepherding advice fills most of the first book of the poem, and overlaps a little into Books II and III. Although he tends to work backwards and forwards over a few key ideas – the value of improvement and labour, the appropriate response to environment and the need for a modulation between human intervention and natural development – Dyer is fairly systematic, and we may read his advice in a sequential way. Firstly he treats the two variables of terrain (lines 18–124) and weather (lines 125–84), before considering the kinds of sheep suitable to different environments (lines 185–250). There follows a section of veterinary advice (lines 251–320), and a ‘calendar’ of information on different concerns in the shepherd's year (lines 321–554), which ends triumphantly in a pastoral rendering of the shearing festival (lines 555–720). We may examine each of these areas of advice in turn.

Dyer's first task, then, is to establish and comment on the basic variables of farming: terrain and weather. As soon as the invocation to the people and the ‘people's Shepherd’ is completed, the poet launches very positively into the subject of terrain:

On spacious airy downs and gentle hills,

With grass and thyme o'erspread, and clover wild,

Where smiling Phoebus tempers ev'ry breeze,

The fairest flocks rejoice: they nor of halt,

Hydropic tumours, nor of rot, complain,

Evils deform'd and foul: nor with hoarse cough

Disturb the music of the past'ral pipe;

But, crowding to the note, with silence soft

The close-woven carpet graze, where Nature blends

Flow'rets and herbage of minutest size,

Innoxious luxury. […]