"Fern Hill"

"Fern Hill" exhibits the poet's strong feeling, strong affection for nature, and imagery of the past, all Romantic elements. The poem evokes the delight and liberty of childhood, and for many it may seem a less substantial work by this poet. The poem concerns the natural course of events in life--childhood takes place, childhood ends, and now the poet looks back to that time and remembers it. In this poem, Thomas achieves the creation of a child's world from the viewpoint of a child who is still living in that world:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Golden in the heydays of his eyes (1-5).

Thomas maintains this tone of voice until the last stanza, when the boy gives way to the man who then expresses his view of the tragic in life, something a child does not see. What is interesting about the poem is that Thomas manages to give the sense of the tragic even before his final comments, and he does this through the eyes of the boy for whom tragedy has no meaning. The reader is thus expecting the final passage without necessarily knowing it.

The farm evoked in "Fern Hill" is a real one where Thomas spent his summer months with relatives when he was a child. This makes the boy in the poem at least in part a representation of Thomas himself as a child. For Thomas, the childhood he remembers was a time of joy, but this fact alo

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ang in my chains like the sea (52-54). Thomas has the Romantic sense of the Garden of Eden in this poem and of the loss that came after. his feeling for the natural world is linked with the nostalgia for childhood. The poem details the typical day for this boy on this particular farm. The day is evoked in the line "All the sun long" (18). For the boy, the day is a day of play among the fields, the hay, the chimneys, everything about this house that he loves. The boy's day is "air/ And playing, lovely and watery/ And fire green as grass" (21-23). The night is also an occasion for play and exploration, with the stars above matched by the movement and cries of animals on the ground, both on the farm and off in the distance. Thomas paints a strong and idyllic picture of the child of childhood and of the wonders of Fern Hill. The boy hears the owls in the distance. Thomas finds the perfect phrase to describe a boy so filled with energy finally going to sleep: As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away, All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars Flying with the ricks, and the horses Flashing into the dark (24-27). Note the parallel construction with "All the moon long" against the earl

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