Fern Hill

West Wales

‘Fern Hill’ is, I think, the best bit of writing the last century has to offer (with the possible exception of ‘The Waste Land’ and a few Beatles lyrics). In it the author, Dylan Thomas, reminisces about childhood, but not in any sort of conventional way. Here is the first part:

“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,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

And here’s the last:

“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.”

It is amazing how much talent and effort goes into producing poetry like that. I don’t know what “down the rivers of the windfall light” means, but I do know that I don’t care. It is the image…the mind reels trying to produce a picture it can coalesce into. And that is what great art is supposed to do: stimulate the imagination. It is not just about telling a story, it is about getting to the heart of the matter that plotpoints can miss.

Obviously days are not lamb white and how can a moon always rise? What is important here is what our own memories are saying to us. Looking back, there are places I explored as a kid that seem special to me, touched by the hand of God. Were they? To my eyes, they were.

Mr. Thomas can be famously difficult and obscure, but I think that obscurity can help, and it definitely helps in this case. To know what is happening to him, what he is feeling as he looks back to when he was younger, we are forced through his elusive language to remember what happened to us, and to acknowledge that sometimes like him all we are doing as adults is singing in our chains as best we can.

The entire poem: Fern Hill