Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Summary and Critical Analysis
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas is an autobiographical poem in which Thomas uses the memories of childhood days in order to explore the theme of journey from innocence to experience. The theme is based on William Blake’s division the world of experience and it is reinforced through the use of Wordsworthian double consciousness.
The poem can be divided into two parts: the first three stanza are related to the poets experience as a child when he uses to spend his summer holidays at his uncle’s farm (Fern Hill, it is in Wan sea in Wales) but the last three stanzas are about an awakening in the child which signifies the loss of the world of innocence. At the center of this loss of the innocence are the myths of fall of the first human beings (Adam and Eve). The world of innocence (child) as described in the first three stanzas is like the Garden of Eden. This is a world in which the child is in complete union with the nature.
This world of fantasy offers the child an Edenic bliss. The way Thomas describes this world; it appears to be timeless world without sense of loss and decay. In the third stanza the poet slowly moves towards the transition between the world of innocence and the world of experience. In the forth stanza the speaker’s sleeping is a symbolic sleeping which ends a flashing into the dark. This flashing is a kind of awakening as hinted by the first line of the fourth stanza. In this awakening the child (speaker) initiates into the world of maturity. “Sleeping” in the poem is symbolic that refers to the loss of innocence that equates the Adam and Eve who had slept after fall from the Grace of God. This initiation of the world of maturity entails the loss of Edenic bliss, innocence, grace and freedom. Moreover poet loses creative imagination and fantasies in which a union with nature was possible.
In the last stanza the poet once again contemplates on the memoirs of his childhood but this time the awareness, becomes dominant. In the last line the poet refers to his chained situation in the world of experience. Now he is in chain, green color is withered now.
So, this poem is the journey from childhood to manhood when the manhood comes, the man suffers from agony. Now I am not what I was in the past. The use of verb “song” hints that the losses can be captured through art in the last line stanza.
Forms and Devices
The poem is composed of six nine-line stanzas that rhyme (mostly with slant rhymes) abcddabcd. The lines have a very flexible accentual rhythm. Lines 1, 2, 6, and 7 have six accents each; lines 3, 4, 8, and 9 have three accents; and line 5 usually has four accents.
Dylan Thomas ties the poem together effectively with strong verbal formulas. The “I” is described as “young and easy,” “green and carefree,” “green and golden,” and finally “green and dying.” Furthermore, he is “happy as the grass was green,” “singing as the farm was home,” and “happy as the heart was long”; he is “honoured among wagons,” “famous among the barns,” “blessed among stables,” and “honoured among foxes and pheasants.” His adversary, time, is also accorded verbal formulas: “Time let me hail and climb/ Golden in the heydays of his eyes”; “Time let me play and be/ Golden in the mercy of his means”; “time allows/so few and such morning songs.” There are other formulaic systems to charm the ear, such as the conversational “Now as I was,” “And as I was,” and “Oh as I was”; the spatial “About the lilting house” and “About the happy yard”; and the temporal “All the sun long” and “All the moon long.”
The color scheme is pervasive and insistent. Implied or explicit, it portrays the Edenic color scheme of nature and its growing things: green, golden, yellow, white, and blue. Even fire is “green as grass.” Green is the most pervasive color, with gold second, as is appropriate for a poem about childhood ripening into adulthood.
There are delightful images, such as the half-concealed list of the four elements in lines 20-22 (“fields,” “air,” “watery,” and “fire”). The eternal day of creation (Genesis 1:3-4, 16-18) is elegantly described as a time and place in the passage “So it must have been after the birth of the first simple light/ In the first spinning place.” God sets the sun spinning in a place called “day”; God the Creator spins the cosmos out of chaos as a woman spins a strong, even thread from a random mass of raw cotton or wool or flax, then to weave it into the fabric of the material world.
Themes and Meanings
The “I” of the poem begins in innocence, the young Adam of the new world. As he experiences it, his correlative is as innocent as he, whether that be the farm or the princess, who is “maiden” rather than “Eve” because (as Genesis 3:20 states) the latter name means “giver of life” or “mother of all the living.” Saint Augustine of Hippo said that history began only after the Original Sin, so the child’s world seems timeless, a new world freshly created at each dawn.
As in many Renaissance poems (William Shakespeare’s Sonnets 18, 55, 65, and 116, for example), time is the enemy, but for the Renaissance reader, Father Time was Cronos (Saturn), who in Greek myth devoured all of his own children. In Thomas’s poem, time is a temporarily benevolent despot, “allowing” and “permitting” the child a time of perfect happiness before he sacrifices his own progeny to the demands of his cannibalistic nature.
At the beginning of the final stanza, Thomas uses a very private and obscure symbol: The lamblike child ascends to the loft of the barn at moonrise and sleeps to awaken no longer innocent, no longer childlike, alienated from the farm and from nature—expelled from Eden. Thus far, the reader may choose to understand this as a symbol of sexual experience of some sort. The episode involves bird symbols as well, however, and these the reader may well interpret as symbols of poetry—swallows, the implied owls and nightjars from the earlier episode of literal sleep (lines 23-27), and the moon herself as mistress of the creative imagination (like the fairy queen, Titania, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, c. 1595-1596). A child does not compose the songs of childhood. Only an adult can do so, for only the adult is thematically possessed of his own past history. Under the influence of the moon of imagination, the sea rises and falls; although a repressive king-figure (Father Time, the god Cronos, the Persian despot Xerxes, or the Danish King Canute of Britain) can attempt to chain the sea, he will not succeed. Hence, the perennial human symbol of expulsion from the limited Eden of newly created innocence also symbolizes the initiation into the more fully human and creative world of mature experience.
When the sea “sing[s] in its chains,” therefore, it does not sing only the green, white, and golden world of Fern Hill, it also sings the green and dying world of the mortal adult. Like a ritual incantation, the poem “Fern Hill” re-creates for the reader the Eden of boyhood, its loss, and its retrieval. Whenever the poem is read and for as long as it takes to read it, the paradise of Fern Hill exists again, is lost again, and is regained.