The Full Text of “Fern Hill”
The Full Text of “Fern Hill”
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“Fern Hill” Introduction
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Dylan Thomas based his 1945 poem "Fern Hill" on childhood experiences at his aunt's farm in Wales, where he grew up. The poem is filled with intensely lyrical language and rich metaphorical descriptions that capture the excitement and joy of playing outside as a child and feeling in harmony with the natural world. The result is a hymn to the wonder and grace of childhood and the pain of its eventual loss.
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“Fern Hill” Summary
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Well, when I was young and relaxed under the branches of the apple trees that surrounded the happy house, and my happiness was as vivid as the intense green of the grass—as vivid as the night's stars over the valley's trees—time himself let me live, call out, and climb, watching as I thrived and flourished in the best days of my life. I was highly respected among the wagons and was the prince of the local towns full of apple orchards. Back then, I was like a king who made the trees and their leaves spread trails of daisy flowers and barley grass on the fields behind them, where the apples blown down by the wind were like a river of light.
And I was young, inexperienced, and had no responsibilities, I was a celebrity around the barns and in the joyful yard, and I sang all over the farm because it felt like home. Under the sun, which is young only once, time allowed me to play and feel golden—at least as far as his mercy and resources allowed. Young, inexperienced, and thriving, I was like a hunter or shepherd. When I blew my trumpet the young cows sang back to me and foxes on the nearby hill barked sharply. The sabbath—the holy day—seemed to ring out slowly from the pebbles in the streams, which seemed holy as well.
I'd spend the whole, lovely day running about. Farmers had stacks of hay as high as the house's roof, and the smoke from the chimneys was like a song. The days were full of fresh air and play, beautiful and flowing. The fire was as green as the grass. Every night under the stars I didn't just fall to sleep, I rode to sleep, and the owls seemed to carry the farm away with them as they took flight. All the moonlit night I could hear the blessed nightjars—nocturnal birds—near the horse stables, flying around the stacks of hay. Light gleamed on the horses' hair before they disappeared into darkness.
And then I would wake up. The farm seemed to return in that moment, like a wandering person shining with morning dew, a rooster on his shoulder. Everything was shining, in fact; it was like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The sky returned and the sun rose again, right then and there. This is what it must have been like when God created the world, making the first light over the spinning earth. The first horses would have been mesmerized by what had happened, walking out of their green stables, which were full of their neighing, and into the warmth, into the fields where everything was praising God.
I was also a celebrity among the foxes and the pheasants (a type of bird) near the happy house under the newly-formed clouds. My heart was filled with happiness, in the light of that sun that rose again and again. I ran without a care, all my desires running with me between the tall stacks of hay. And I didn't care at all—as I went about my tasks, which were blue as the sky—that time, with all his beautiful music, doesn't allow people to have very many songs of childhood. Soon, children, inexperienced and full of joy, have to follow time out of their innocence.
But I didn't care, in those days when I was innocent as a lamb, that time would lead me to the attic that was full of swallows (a type of bird), guiding me by my hand's shadow—all in the light of the moon that seems to keep rising and rising. And I didn't care that as I went to sleep I would hear time flying over the fields, and that when I woke up the farm would be gone and there would be no more children. Oh! When I was young and happy in the short childhood that I was granted, time embraced me, still young and inexperienced but already dying, even though I was locked in chains, singing like the sea.
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“Fern Hill” Themes
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Childhood's Joy and Innocence
“Fern Hill” is first and foremost a celebration of childhood. The speaker’s rich descriptions center around childhood’s happy innocence, the way children feel like a unique part of a harmonious world—a world in which everything is special yet works together. The speaker suggests that to be a kid is to experience such specialness and harmony, such feelings of simultaneous freedom and security.
The poem brims with positive descriptions of the speaker’s childhood at Fern Hill (an aunt’s farm that Thomas often visited as a child), indicating how the speaker looks back on these experiences as a time of joy and innocence. For instance, the speaker begins the poem by describing how “easy” life felt as a child, saying “I was young and easy under the apple boughs.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that the speaker had it easy, so to speak. Rather, the speaker felt at ease at Fern Hill. In other words, there was no friction between the speaker and the rest of world.
The speaker compares this feeling of harmony to being “prince of the apple towns.” This might suggest that the speaker felt like the ruler of the local towns that produce apples. More to the point, however, it captures how the speaker felt special, “famous among the barns,” as a child, as though the entire world itself was paying attention to him.
Such a feeling conveys the speaker’s joyful, innocent attitude; there was nothing to fear or dread, and instead days were filled with excitement and wonder. The speaker saw only good in the surrounding world, describing how “my wishes raced through the house high hay.” In other words, the whole farm seemed to grant the speaker’s wishes. To the young speaker, everything was sweet and fun, fulfilling all the speaker’s desires. The speaker was free from all worries and cares, instead allowed to simply enjoy the splendor of the world.
By recollecting childhood in such vivid terms, the speaker reveals how it shines forth in memory as a truly wonderful time. As a child, the speaker felt harmonious in a world where a kid could be “famous among the barns.” Everything was special, and the speaker had all that could be asked for.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-46
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The Harmony and Wonder of Nature
The speaker's childhood joy is closely connected to his experiences playing outside. Childhood happiness, the poem suggests, comes in part from feeling a strong sense of connection with the natural world. To be young and innocent is to be one with nature, the poem suggests—and the natural world itself is presented as a place filled with wonder, peace, and harmony.
Throughout the poem, the speaker emphasizes how close he felt to nature as a child. “I was green and carefree,” the speaker says, for example. The word “green” refers to being young and inexperienced, but it's also a metaphor here, comparing someone to a green shoot or stick (i.e., young plant growth). As a child, the speaker was like a young plant that didn't have a care in the world because it was just so excited to be alive. The speaker returns to the word "green" throughout the poem, repeatedly suggesting that children are as much a part of nature as leaves or newly sprouted plants.
The speaker also describes this time as “lovely” and full of “playing.” “All the sun long it was running,” says the speaker, making it sound as though the day itself would run along with him, like a friend might. The speaker also evokes “tunes from the chimneys” and calls the surrounding air “lovely and watery.” As the young speaker explored the landscape, all the elements of that landscape seemed like his playmates; the sun, hay, smoke, air, and water would also frolic and sing.
As these descriptions accumulate, the speaker’s childhood seems at one with nature. Rather than just playing in nature, the speaker plays as a part of it. For example, the speaker says, “I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves / Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold.” The speaker, as a child, felt like both a hunter and shepherd in this landscape. It’s not that the speaker was killing or protecting things, but that the speaker had a role to play; it felt as if all these animals responded to the speaker. Again, then, the speaker's childhood joy stemmed in large part from feeling in harmony with the natural world.
The feeling of being a part of the landscape even extended to nighttime: “And nightly under the simple stars / As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away.” Here, the elements of the landscape all get mixed up, so that the flying owls seem to carry the farm away and the speaker seems to ride them! In this description—and many others like it throughout the poem—the speaker and elements of the landscape seem to blend together. Night, then, captures the height of the speaker’s joyful connection with the natural world. Child, owl, barn, stars all swoop through the world as part of each other.
It’s clear that the speaker remembers childhood as a time of joyful romping through nature. That joy was the result of feeling like a part of the landscape, rather than apart from it. And adulthood, the poem argues in the end, is incompatible with such feelings; the joyous "farm" of the speaker's youth has since "forever fled from the childless land." Adults are no longer able to access the sense of peace and harmony that comes from being one with nature—they are effectively kicked out of this Eden.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-3
- Lines 6-12
- Lines 15-54
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The Power of Time
Throughout “Fern Hill,” time looms as a godlike presence. Time grants the speaker a brief period of childhood happiness, yet it also ensures that nothing lasts forever and that all joys come to an end. Ultimately, the poem presents time as an unstoppable force with control over human beings.
Very soon after the poem begins, the speaker personifies time as an all mighty figure. This figure mercifully grants the speaker a brief period of childhood, while also looming over that childhood with the threat of imminent change. In the first stanza, the speaker describes time as a kind of god that “let[s]” the speaker experience a joyful childhood: “Time let me hail and climb / Golden in the heyday of his eyes.” Here, time almost seems like a giant in whose eyes the speaker can “climb.” This metaphorical description captures how time enables people to have childhoods in the first place. Without time, there’d be no “heyday” to “climb” in.
In fact, this personified time is merciful for allowing childhood to exist. “Time let me play and be / Golden in the mercy of his means,” says the speaker. Time grants the speaker a “golden” childhood, but only has enough “mercy” to provide a short one. The speaker has a keen sense of how time only permits people to be children for so long. Pretty soon, the time’s up.
As a result, time as a personified figure represents a looming sense of change. However, as a child, the speaker didn’t fully comprehend childhood’s brevity: “And nothing I cared […] that time allows […] so few and such morning songs.” In other words, the speaker didn’t know or didn’t care that childhood would be over so soon, that time is merciful only up to a point. This ignorance further highlights the inevitability and surprise of time’s passage. Everybody knows they’re going to grow up, and yet, somehow, it still comes as a surprise when it actually happens.
Presiding as an all-powerful force throughout the poem, time gives the speaker a wonderful childhood and then takes it away. Both predictable and unrelenting, there’s nothing that can be done about the passage of time.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 4-5
- Line 7
- Lines 13-14
- Line 39
- Lines 42-54
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The End of Childhood Grace
When nature runs its course, the poem implies, children grow up, losing the “grace” of childhood. According to Christianity, grace is the experience of God’s love and an awareness that all of God’s creations are good. For the speaker, childhood represents such an experience, and the end of childhood is thus a painful fall from grace.
The speaker often frames the goodness of childhood through allusions to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. This religious lens captures how the speaker remembers childhood as a paradise akin to the Garden of Eden. For instance, the speaker describes waking up to the world covered with dew as “all / Shining, it was Adam and maiden.” This moment explicitly compares the speaker’s childhood memories with the story of Adam and Eve, revealing that the speaker thinks childhood is like being in the Garden of Eden.
In Eden, the story goes, Adam and Eve felt at one with everything around them. They tended to the garden, felt no shame, and knew nothing of evil. The speaker imagines childhood feeling a lot like being in Eden: “So it must have been after the birth of the simple light / In the first, spinning place.” In other words, living in the newly created world must have been a lot like being a kid at Fern Hill.
Understood through the lens of Christianity, the speaker’s memories are filled with “grace.” The Christian idea of grace has a lot of meanings and resonances, but in terms of this poem it can be roughly summed up as being close to God, just as Adam and Eve were. For the speaker, childhood itself is grace. All the speaker’s experiences of feeling special, of sensing the harmony of the world, are part of that grace. For the speaker as a child, the world’s divinity can be seen even in the humblest stones; “And the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams,” the speaker says. In this state of grace, the speaker can see that the whole world is good, that it is all full of God’s divinity.
At the end of the poem, the speaker loses the grace of childhood just as Adam and Eve lost their grace, and along with it the paradise of Eden. This experience is very painful for the speaker. The last lines of the second-to-last stanza describe how “the children green and golden / Follow [Time] out of grace.” Just as Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden, the speaker “wake[s] to the farm forever fled from the childless land.” It’s as if one day the speaker wakes up, no longer a child, and all the joy has been sucked out of the world. The speaker doesn’t feel connected to the world anymore, either. Instead, all paradise and harmony has been removed, leaving the speaker alone.
Moreover, just as Adam and Even could now experience physical and emotional pain, the speaker now knows suffering. The poem ends on a dramatic and mysterious image that captures this suffering: “Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” This image of a dying, enchained sea conveys the pain of childhood ending. Put simply, it feels awful. Thus bleakly ends the speaker’s depiction of childhood’s grace. Now, like Adam and Eve, the speaker feels the pain of losing that “green and golden” paradise.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-54
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Fern Hill”
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Lines 1-2
Now as I ...
... grass was green,"Fern Hill" is based on Dylan Thomas's childhood experiences at his aunt's farm of the same name. Rather than describe this subject in a straightforward manner, however, Thomas use extravagant language to evoke his memories. In the process, the poem transforms autobiographical material into a general celebration of a childhood spent outdoors. But by the end, the poem has become a lament for the loss of childhood as people grow up.
This language in this poem is characteristic of Thomas. It's a swirl of imagery, sounds, impressions, and allusions that isn't always meant to be taken literally. A poem like "Fern Hill" wants to sweep its reader of their feet, transporting them through a dreamy realm on a journey guided by emotion and imaginative associations. The first step in getting to know a Dylan Tomas poem is to enjoy it, to bask in the poem's sumptuous intensity and its sense of beauty. That said, it is still totally possible to talk about this poem. In fact, there's a lot to say!
The poem begins with the speaker's memory of a typical day at Fern Hill. The speaker lounges "under the apple boughs." Nearby is the "lilting house." The speaker is "happy as the grass was green." These two phrases, "lilting house" and "happy as the grass was green," both use the kind of associative poetic logic that the speaker will turn to throughout the poem. That is, they blend different senses together to create a vivid impression of the speaker's feelings.
"Lilting" means singing or speaking with a gentle rising-and-falling sound. A house that sings isn't a literal image, and this isn't going to be a literal poem. Rather, these early lines hint at how the poem exists in its own universe of richly metaphorical descriptions, where a house can be so wonderful that it sings.
The simile "happy as the grass was green" suggests that the intensity of the speaker's happiness matches the vividness of the grass. Again, senses blur together, so that an emotion (happiness) and a color (green) can be compared to each other, or even fuse into the same thing. This blurring or fusing suggests that the speaker's inner world of emotions and outer world of natural sights are all mixed up together in the poem's heightened version of reality.
The poem begins, "Now as I was young." This "Now" is interesting because it evokes the present tense, while the rest of the poem is in the past tense ("I was"). Of course, "Now" can be interpreted idiomatically here, like beginning a sentence with Now then, or Well, or So guess what. It's a way of getting someone's attention and introducing a train of thought. The speaker mines the richness of this idiom, using it to draw attention to another kind of blurring, this time between past and present. Throughout the poem, the speaker will bask in wonderful memories of the past—memories that almost seem like the present.
These two lines, along with the rest of the poem, are structured syllabically. Syllabics is a formal constraint that modernist poets like Dylan Thomas often used to structure their poems in place of meter. A poem written using syllabics adheres to a certain number of syllables per line, rather than to a certain number of stresses as in traditional meter. These first two lines have 14 syllables each. This establishes a pattern that the first two lines of each stanza will follow.
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Lines 3-5
The night above ...
... of his eyes, -
Lines 6-9
And honoured among ...
... the windfall light. -
Lines 10-14
And as I ...
... of his means, -
Lines 15-18
And green and ...
... the holy streams. -
Lines 19-22
All the sun ...
... green as grass. -
Lines 23-27
And nightly under ...
... into the dark. -
Lines 28-32
And then to ...
... that very day. -
Lines 33-36
So it must ...
... fields of praise. -
Lines 37-41
And honoured among ...
... house high hay -
Lines 42-45
And nothing I ...
... out of grace, -
Lines 46-51
Nothing I cared, ...
... the childless land. -
Lines 52-54
Oh as I ...
... like the sea.
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“Fern Hill” Symbols
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Fern Hill
"Fern Hill" takes its title from an aunt's farm that Dylan Thomas often visited as a child. In the poem, it represents the wonderful farm that speaker recalls, a symbol of childhood's joy and innocence, which has now been lost.
Fern Hill isn't named anywhere in the poem except the title. However, every line in the poem unpacks the farm's symbolic resonance, whether capturing the speaker's childhood joy, or hinting at how the passage of time would eventually cause that joy to be lost. Sinking back into vivid memories, the speaker conjures the many wonderful elements of the farm: its plants and animals, how it felt at night and at dawn. Then, at the end of the poem, the speaker depicts how "the farm forever fled from the childless land." In other words—as a symbol of childhood's joy and innocence—the farm leaves the speaker when the speaker grows up. After the speaker becomes an adult, Fern Hill exists only in memory.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2: “under the apple boughs / About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,”
- Line 3: “The night above the dingle starry,”
- Lines 6-7: “And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns / And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves”
- Line 8: “Trail with daisies and barley”
- Line 9: “Down the rivers of the windfall light.”
- Lines 10-11: “famous among the barns / About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,”
- Lines 15-16: “And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves / Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,”
- Lines 19-20: “All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay / Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air”
- Line 21: “And playing, lovely and watery”
- Lines 24-27: “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.”
- Lines 28-30: “And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white / With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all / Shining, it was Adam and maiden,”
- Lines 37-38: “And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house / Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,”
- Line 41: “My wishes raced through the house high hay”
- Line 51: “And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.”
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Green and Golden
Color pays an important role in "Fern Hill," and no two colors are as important to the poem as green and gold. Green symbolizes youthful inexperience and naiveté, while gold symbolizes the joy and magic—even the "prince[liness]"—of childhood.
Green is often used as an idiom to mean inexperienced, comparing a youngster to a green sapling or sprout. In the poem, "green" captures how inexperienced children really are like sprouts. They are just as much a part of the natural world as delicate plants. For instance, as a child the speaker was "happy as the grass was green," comparing a child's happiness to the green of grass. At the end of the poem, the speaker says, "Time held me green and dying," which suggests that people begin to sense their own mortality while they're still kids—that, as the speaker implies throughout the poem, being a child is over much too soon.
"Golden," meanwhile, captures the majesty of childhood. It first appears in the first stanza:
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple townsThe phrase "prince of the apple towns" gives a sense of how the speaker means for "golden" to be taken. It captures the specialness the speaker felt being out in the world as a young child, of feeling like royalty amid humble things. More broadly, golden suggests the joy and magic of childhood.
Paired together, "green and golden" craft a picture of how naiveté and youthful imagination weave together to create childhood's best memories.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 2: “happy as the grass was green”
- Line 5: “Golden in the heydays of his eyes”
- Line 10: “And as I was green and carefree”
- Lines 14-15: “Golden in the mercy of his means, / And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman”
- Line 22: “And fire green as grass”
- Line 35: “Out of the whinnying green stable”
- Line 44: “Before the children green and golden”
- Line 53: “Time held me green and dying”
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White
While "green and golden" symbolize the naiveté and magic of childhood, white symbolizes its innocence. White is first referenced at the beginning of the fourth stanza:
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back [...]Light reveals the farm at dawn, so that it reappears like a traveler who is covered in so much dew that he gleams white. In western literature, the color white often represents innocence, and here it captures the role the farm played in the young speaker's innocent perception of the world.
At the beginning of the last stanza, the speaker uses white in a more overtly symbolic manner:
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 Christianity, lambs symbolize innocence—often the innocence of Jesus, which is ultimately sacrificed. The speaker's innocence is like that too. It is eventually sacrificed to make way for adulthood. Here, the speaker loses that innocence by going up to the dark, shadowy, "swallow thronged" attic.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 28-29: “like a wanderer white / With the dew”
- Line 46: “the lamb white days”
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“Fern Hill” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is an extremely important part of "Fern Hill." Not only does it add to the poem's musicality, but it creates an almost chant-like sound, leaving the reader "spellbound" by the poem's extravagant music.
The second stanza contains some of the poem's most intense alliteration:
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.In these lines, the speaker first expresses the joy of feeling like all the animals respond to the speaker. The phrase, "And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman," with its echoing /h/ and /g/ sounds, captures the speaker's excitement. Then, the speaker describes how the landscape itself feels holy. The lines shorten and the alliteration begins to slow down, mimicking how "the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy stream." The delay of the last /s/ sound suggests time slowing down to a standstill, a sense of peace at the end of the stanza.
A similar effect occurs in the fourth stanza:
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stableHere, the speaker imagines the beginning of the world, according to how the Bible tells it. This is a truly rapturous event, where light, the earth, and animals are all created. After being created, the horses are "spellbound," mesmerized by what has happened, and the alliteration captures this amazement. The hushed sibilance of those /s/ sounds works with the quiet /w/ sounds to create a feeling of wonder and reverence, while the stronger /b/ and /p/ sounds add yet more interest and excitement to the lines.
At the end of the poem, the rapture of alliteration has turned into a much sadder sound. For instance, in the last stanza, the phrase "the farm forever fled from the childless land" conveys the sudden sadness at realizing that childhood is over forever. The repeated /f/ sounds suggest that the speaker speaks this line emphatically and sorrowfully, spitting out these words in sadness and frustration.
The final lines, "Though I sang in my chains like the sea," have an even more sorrowful, wistful air to them. Separated by a bit more space than other occurrences of alliteration (such as the previous example), these /s/ sounds again convey a sort of slowing down. This time, however, they don't convey any sort of peace, but rather an experience of intense melancholy, even suffering.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 2: “house,” “happy,” “grass,” “green”
- Line 4: “hail”
- Line 5: “heydays”
- Line 7: “time,” “lordly,” “trees,” “leaves”
- Line 8: “Trail,” “daisies”
- Line 9: “Down”
- Line 14: “mercy,” “means”
- Line 15: “green,” “golden,” “huntsman,” “herdsman”
- Line 16: “clear,” “cold”
- Line 17: “sabbath,” “slowly”
- Line 18: “streams”
- Line 19: “long,” “lovely,” “hay”
- Line 20: “high,” “house”
- Line 22: “green,” “grass”
- Line 23: “simple,” “stars”
- Line 24: “sleep”
- Line 26: “Flying”
- Line 27: “Flashing”
- Line 28: “wanderer,” “white”
- Line 29: “With,” “come,” “cock,” “shoulder”
- Line 30: “Shining”
- Line 31: “gathered”
- Line 32: “grew”
- Line 33: “So,” “been,” “birth,” “simple”
- Line 34: “spinning,” “spellbound,” “walking,” “warm”
- Line 35: “whinnying”
- Line 37: “foxes,” “pheasants”
- Line 38: “happy,” “heart”
- Line 39: “over,” “over”
- Line 40: “heedless,” “ways”
- Line 41: “wishes,” “raced,” “house,” “high,” “hay”
- Line 42: “trades,” “time”
- Line 43: “tuneful,” “turning,” “so,” “such,” “songs”
- Line 44: “green,” “golden”
- Line 45: “grace”
- Line 46: “time,” “take”
- Line 48: “rising”
- Line 49: “riding”
- Line 50: “fly,” “fields”
- Line 51: “farm,” “forever,” “fled,” “from”
- Line 52: “mercy,” “means”
- Line 54: “sang,” “sea”
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Allusion
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Personification
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Anaphora
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Imagery
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Repetition
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Enjambment
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Asyndeton
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Parallelism
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"Fern Hill" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Easy
- Lilting
- Dingle
- Hail
- Heydays
- Honoured
- Apple towns
- Below a time
- Lordly
- Barley
- Windfall
- Mercy
- Means
- Huntsman
- Herdsman
- Calves
- Horn
- Sabbath
- Hay fields
- Tunes
- Bearing
- Nightjars
- Ricks
- Cock
- Simple light
- Spinning place
- Spellbound
- Whinnying
- Pheasants
- Gay
- Heedless
- Trades
- Tuneful
- Turning
- Grace
- Swallow
- Thronged
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “easy”)
Relaxed; easygoing; comfortable.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Fern Hill”
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Form
"Fern Hill" is composed of six nine-line stanzas. These stanzas are structured syllabically, meaning that each stanza has a certain number of syllables in each line. This structure is covered in more detail in the Meter section of this guide. Formally, however, it's helpful to note how this structure leads to distinctively shaped stanzas, which undulate between long and short lines. The poem also indents certain lines. On the page, the poem seems to narrow down, then expand, then narrow down again.
Shaped forms like this have been used for centuries. Some shaped poems purposefully mimic what they are written about. For instance, in Renaissance poet George Herbert's "Easter Wings," the poem narrows and expands in the shape of wings. It could be possible to interpret Thomas's poem along these lines: hold the poem sideways, and it looks like a seismograph registering the highs and lows, the joyful energy and the moments of stillness, in the speaker's memories of childhood.
More often, though, poets use indentation and shape to accentuate different line lengths, so that the music and architecture of the poem is apparent just by looking at it. Thomas's poetry tends to fall more in this camp. In "Fern Hill," shape captures a sense of the speaker's energy and motion. Rather than remaining in one static block of uniform text (as for example, the blank verse of Wordsworth's "The Prelude," which also depicts childhood) the poem moves through a much more dynamic structure, channeling its energy through what almost looks like a series of funnels and echo chambers. (For another example of a poem that uses its shape to accentuate vivid memories of childhood, see instead Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality.")
At the same time, the repetitive nature of the form captures how the speaker's memories continually circle back to the same images and impressions. Each stanza echoes the appearance of the previous stanza, just as the word "green" reverberates throughout the poem. So, the visual appearance of "Fern Hill" isn't just pretty, it conveys the poem's sense of energy, movement, and echoes directly to the reader.
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Meter
Rather than using a meter based on stress, the speaker bases the structure of the poem around syllable count. Each line contains a certain number of syllables, yielding a pattern of line-lengths for each stanza. For instance, the first two lines have 14 syllables each:
Now | as | I | was | young | and | ea- | sy | un- | der | the ap- | ple boughs
A- | bout | the lil- | ting | house | and | hap- | py | as | the | grass | was | green,The first, second, and sixth stanzas each have following pattern of syllables:
14-14-9-6-9-14-14-7-9
While the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas have following pattern:
14-14-9-6-9-14-14-9-6
These patterns are almost identical except for the last two lines. In the second pattern, the stanza loses a syllable and the last line is one of its shortest. This creates a narrowing down effect, as if the poem is whittling away to nothing. Meanwhile, in the first pattern the poem seems to start expanding again, anticipating the long lines of the next stanzas.
Between the two, closely related patterns, the poem crafts a repetitive pattern with subtle variations. Just as reverberating music notes can create harmony or dissonance depending on their context, these echoing syllabic patterns capture the endless memories of childhood's joys, as well as the unpleasant realization that childhood, like this poem, must come to an end.
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Rhyme Scheme
The speaker of "Fern Hill" pays very close attention to the patterns of sound between words. As a result, there are many moments of slant rhyme, as well as some internal rhyme. A subtle rhyme scheme arises out of the poem's distinct use of sound.
For instance, in the first stanza "green," "starry," "leaves," and "barley" all feature the long /ee/ sound, "boughs" and "towns" use the /ow/ sound, and "climb," "eyes," and "light" use the long /i/. This pattern isn't necessarily apparent at first glance. However, such uses of slant rhyme create a feeling of some sort of structure in the background. So, with the caveat that some of the poem's rhymes are stronger and more noticeable than others, the rhyme scheme the poem is roughly as follows:
ABBCCABBC
Unlike a poem that uses full rhymes however, "Fern Hill" operates on a level that is much more intuitive, even subconscious. Its rhymes seem more like faintly heard echoes, or dimly recognized similarities. Not every stanza follows this scheme exactly, but for the most part it guides the poem.
This mimics the way the speaker's memory works: it isn't highly logical and rigid, but associative and free flowing. Like slant rhyme, the speaker's memory repeats images while also changing them slightly, as when "happy as the grass was grass" becomes "fire green as grass" becomes "happy as the heart was long." The poem's use of slant rhyme, then, contributes to the texture of the speaker's memory in general.
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“Fern Hill” Speaker
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The speaker of "Fern Hill" is someone who's intensely nostalgic for childhood. Although the poem takes its title from a real place—an aunt's farm that Thomas often visited a child—the poem itself is much broader than that. It could apply to anyone who had a childhood full of joyful experiences outdoors, and to anyone who wishes that childhood could have been longer.
In other words, the speaker could be anyone. Most of the images in the poem are pretty general: "grass," "trees," "fields," etc., so that nothing is too specific to a single childhood. That is, Thomas purposefully gets rid of singularly autobiographical details. For instance, it's not "Old Ned's horses" or something like that, but just "the horses." Additionally, many of these images have a metaphorical level to them, such as when the speaker refers to "the lilting house." This compares the wonderfulness of the house to singing, as if it's a singing house. By speaking in this way, the speaker seems to become metaphorical or allegorical: someone who can represent anyone who has had similar experiences.
Furthermore, because the poem sometimes has the feel of a spell or a chant meant to conjure the lost joys of childhood, there's an additional sense of how it could be spoken by anyone. Anyone who wants to retrieve all those warm memories of being a kid can pick and the poem and begin reading it, and the poem will help them get in the right headspace to think about those memories.
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“Fern Hill” Setting
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"Fern Hill" takes its title from an aunt's farm that Thomas often visited as a child. It might be said that the poem takes place on this farm, or on a farm—though it is more accurate to say the poem take's place in the speaker's memory of a farm. In this memory, the farm is devoid of any details that link it to a specific person's life. Rather, the speaker describes the farm in the most general terms possible. The speaker uses rich, metaphorical, even surreal language. This kind of language makes the poem feel as if it takes place within the speaker's mind, as the speaker conjures all the glorious details of life as a kid.
As a result, the farm in this poem is a swirl of memories and impressions, of senses fused together so that houses sing and the sun is recreated every morning. Many of the key events are clearly not meant to be taken literally, as at the end of the poem, when the speaker describes how:
[...] time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,And how:
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.In these dark, mysterious, and magical descriptions, the speaker invokes the kind of landscape that appears in fairy tales and folklore. In the speaker's memories Fern Hill isn't just a plain old farm, but a wonderful, fantastic kingdom brimming with magic and delight—and eventually sadness.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Fern Hill”
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Literary Context
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was part of the second generation of modernists. This group of 20th-century writers, which included figures like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, sought new forms of expression. They wrote daring and expansive poems that tried to reinvent how people saw the world and what language could do.
Thomas was something of a prodigy. He published many of his intense, idiosyncratic poems when he was just a teenager. While his stylistic inventiveness places him among the modernists, his pantheistic feelings about nature and his passionate sincerity also mark him as a descendent of 19th-century Romantic poets like William Blake and John Keats (both of whom he read enthusiastically). He also admired his contemporaries W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden, who, like him, often wrote of the "mystery" behind everyday life (though in very different ways).
Historical Context
Thomas published "Fern Hill" in October 1945, one month after the end of WWII. Whether intentionally or not, then, the poem reacts to the horrors of the Second World War with nostalgia for the simpler days of childhood. WWII saw fire-bombing all over Europe, millions killed in genocidal death camps, and the dropping of the atomic bomb. It was a dark time for the world, heralding the worst aspects of modernity. "Fern Hill" adamantly retreats from the darkness, basking in the magic and innocence of childhood, a time before the true horrors of the world were apparent.
"Fern Hill" is based on Fernhill, an aunt's farm in Wales that Thomas often visited as a child. Thomas grew up in Wales, and although he spent much time abroad—particularly in New York City—his Welsh heritage always remained important to him. Thomas often returned to his memory of growing up in Wales as material for his writing, weaving nostalgia for that time with his distinctive lyrical voice.
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More “Fern Hill” Resources
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External Resources
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More on Thomas's Life — A succinct biography from the Academy of American Poets.
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The Dylan Thomas Center — Additional resources from the Dylan Thomas Center in Wales.
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A Biography of Thomas — A more detailed biography of Dylan Thomas from the Poetry Foundation.
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Thomas at the BBC — Resources on Dylan Thomas from the BBC, with whom Thomas often recorded readings.
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Thomas Reading "Fern Hill" — Dylan Thomas reads "Fern Hill" in his deep, distinctive voice.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Dylan Thomas
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