Fern Hil

“Fern Hill” is Dylan Thomas’s vehicle to express his recollections of youth, through the eyes of an aging adult, and his sentiments and realizations about growing old and facing death. For Thomas, time has been the consummate enemy of betrayal for the protagonist known as youth. Through the use of metaphors, hyperbole, alliteration, and metonymy, Thomas weaves his sorrowful epiphany of life.

Immediately, Thomas portrays that life is easy and carefree for the young. For Thomas, youth is a time when time is abundant to learn, explore, and experience the simple joys of green grass and precious golden days. Thomas’s expresses his precise and deliberate description of children having no concept of time in lines twelve through fourteen when he says,

“In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means.”

Through the use of personification, Thomas gives time the ability to allow the child to live and enjoy the youthful beauty surrounding him. Throughout the poem, Thomas repetitively uses the colors “green” and “golden” to symbolize a spectrum ranging from innocence to decay for green and carefree to having value for golden. In addition, Thomas uses green to characterize the rich beauty of nature.

The genesis or nexus for “Fern Hill” is the time Thomas spent in his youth at a relative’s farm during the summers. Thomas spiritually and metaphorically connects the farm’s barns, farmhouse, and wondrous fields to the Garden of Eden and “Adam and maiden.” His use of the color white to describe the farm “like a wanderer white with dew,” underscores the concept of purity and innocence and parallels his perception of what the Garden of Eden must have been like. Additional uses of Biblical allusion are evident in references to the “Sabbath” and “holy streams.” His hyperbolic recollections and lamentations for his lost childhood are most evident when he anoints himself as “honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns,” where “time let me hail and climb,” and when Thomas declares that there are “fields high as the house,” a notion based on the perception of a child small in stature.

Thomas’s archetypal and repetitive use of the color green to define his carefree days of youth, free from the rigors of life as he now knows life to behold, creates a juxtaposition of his feelings of the vibrancy of his youth and envy for the days of its naivety. His personification of the green grass as “happy” conjures a childlike drawing of blades of grass enjoying the sunlight and surrounding the youth with a safe place to romp and play.

The musings of this youth, about which Thomas writes as a repetitive adult, accentuate the adolescent view of the meaning of time. For Thomas, youth is when one has control over the world and when youth slept, the world stopped, and when youth arose, as did the universe reinventing itself every day to provide new and exciting