Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas (Analysis)

 

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas

(Analysis) 

A Welsh genius, Dylan Thomas was a matchless poetic personality. He was a lyric poet of the twentieth century England. Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-53) was born in Swansea. He was the son of the England teacher at Swansea Grammar school, where he himself was educated. He knew no Welsh. He began to write poetry while he was still at school. He worked in Swansea as a journalist before moving to London in 1934. His first volume of poems, 18 poems, appeared in the same year. He then chose the career of journalism, broadcasting and film-making, spending much of his time in the beautiful afternoon drinking clubs of the time, and soon acquiring a reputation as both poet and popular personality.

In spite of some charges of deliberate obscurity Thomas romantic, affirmative, rhetorical style gradually won a large following. It was both new and influential (much imitated by his contemporaries of the New Apocalypse Movement). His publication of Death and Entrances (1946) which contains some of his best known poems including Fern Hill and A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London established him as a poet of prominence. His Collected Poems 1934-1952 (1952) sold extremely well.

Dylan Thomas also wrote a considerable amount of prose. The Map of Love (1939) is a collection of prose and verse. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) is a collection of autobiographical short stories. Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955) is a collection of stories. A Prospect of the Sea (1955) is a collection of stories and essays. He was also a popular entertainer on radio and with students. In 1950 he undertook the first of his lecture tours to the United States and he died there on his fourth visit in 1953, as the story grew about his wild living and heavy and hard drinking. Shortly before his death, he took part in a reading in New York of what was to be his most famous single work, Under Miek Wood.

Fern Hill was published in 1946 in the volumes of poems entitled Death and Entrances. In this poem, there are 200 drafts of this lyric. It was given its final and present shape in 1945. It ranks very high among the lyrics of Dylan. It is remarkable for its clarity and direct statements.

Fern Hill was the name of the farm of Dylan’s aunt Arm Jones, and as a boy, he passed the happier moments on this farm in the summer season with his aunt. The lyric is a celebration of these farm holidays. When he grew-up and visited this farm he found that ‘the glory and the dream’ had gone out of the farm. His youthful fantasies were no longer possible for him. This poem reminds us the 17th century poets as Vaughan, Marvell and Victorian poet Hopkins etc. It is called the best poem. ‘Thomas himself is in certain respects a throwback.’

The poem begins with a subtle, unemphasized opposition between Time and the boy hero. He plays about the house and under the apple trees as “happy as the grass was green”- that is, as happy the day was long. And the rest of the stanza describes a daytime scene. But the line immediately succeeding “happy as the grass was green” skips ahead to the time of night which puts an end to playing- “The night above the dingle starry.”

Time allows the young Dylan to have and go his ways, but only within limits. Thomas employs equal skill and with the same result in the last line: “Down the rivers of the windfall light.” The contradictory significance of the odd epithet ‘windfall’ almost escapes attention. Light, thus, is that which comes easily, naturally, and as a kind of gift. The concept of a decay and end of light has little or no initial impact.

In the second stanza, Thomas is inert enough in the phrase, “the sun that is young once only.” But in “And the sabbath rang slowly,” he is at his tricks again, on the one hand there is the idea that everybody is a holiday and a holy day, as long as one of those Victorian Sunday afternoons, which never seemed to end.

The idea is explicit in the third stanza in “All the sun long it was running......” And the next contradiction between long and running. It is not only Thomas who is running but also the horses of the day.

Thomas sees high hayfields and smoke from the chimneys. And there is a oneness, an assimilation of himself into the four elements:

It was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

In the second half of the stanza, the child is usually lying down and looking up. His movement does not cease- he rides to sleep. But it is a less dramatic movement than that of the farm about him, which flies into space, and of the horse, which transform into horses of night.

“For the child, the farm so fabulously wafted away, fabulously returns like the Prodigal, or Adam restored to the Garden or Peter waking to find himself unforsworn. But merely to name the Prodigal, and Adam, and Peter is to speak the inevitable loss of simplicity of innocence, of faith. Even this fourth stanza “White with the dew,” has its hints of mortality.

Wordsworth and Traherne speak from a distance, as adults, the sense of less strong upon them, there is a re-creation, not a creation; they are not in the child’s world but looking back and expounding upon it.

Time, which has an art to throw dust on all things, broods over the poem. Time is our enemy. Eliot says, it is only in time and through it that we escape from it. Youth is an ignorant escape that time allows, and wiser memory another. Fern Hill is Thomas victory over what he laments. The green and golden joy of childhood and the shadowy sorrow of maturity become the joy of art.

David Holbrook’s interpretation of the poem in his book Dylan Thomas: The Code of Night is also illuminating and interesting. In his view David was a schizoid, an individual who can relate himself to a world of his own imagination, but withdraws in fear from the external world. Here Dylan withdraws into the world of his early boyhood. “He creates the world of childhood, in which the child makes his world and endows it with significance:”

The sky gathered again,

And the sun grew round that very day.

The state of childhood in which one may believe in one’s omnipotence, and cosmic importance is distanced. As he creates the child’s vision, he enters the phantasy life of infancy so that to him everyday is the first day:

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 stable

On to the fields of praise.

The ‘sky blue trades’ of phantasy belong to a time when nature allows one to have an ‘irresponsible’ dream, which takes no account of world and time. The poem brings it home to us that our sense of our own validity and our sense of the world’s meaning emerge from this first irresponsible vision. To be honored, lordly, carefree, famous has a ‘golden’ and ‘green’ value which underlies our capacity to feel alive in a world colored with significance. It is the child who can hear the tunes in the chimneys, and who knows a sun that is ‘young once only.’

The poem is intensely nostalgic. Adult consciousness brings a less of phantasy freedom. The child is self-enclosed in his Eden, and the poem encounters the paradoxes of omnipotence and impotence, freedom and slavery. The swallows are a symbol of life- gathering, and also of movement about the world. ‘The ridding and flying’ express as a desire to grow up and the singing expresses a defiant joyfulness, even in spite of the passing of time. Time holds him, like a benign mother, and spares the child the recognition of the cruelty of the passing of time, that is all. But the poem is written from a perspective which sees how, after childhood, one has passed out of grass.

The effect of the poem on us is to recapture for us the energy and vision of childhood, and to helps us infuse our own adult attitudes with something of the visionary power of the child, indeed to see that we only see a meaningful world because of that first irresponsible vision.

Language is used in a very original and eloquent way. There is repetition, “green” is repeated in each stanza. Starting similes like “fire green as grass”; transferred epithets such as Spellbound horses walking warm Out of the whinnying green stable;

Arresting metaphors such as “rode to sleep”. “It was Adam maiden” gain its effect by compression; exaggeration as when the hay fields were “high as the house”, are all meant to suggest the child’s imagination. The poet is adopting the child’s view of the world and life.

Phrases like “all the sun long”, “all the moon long” show how a child measures time. Striking phrases much as “once below a time”, the rivers of the windfall light” in the first stanza should be noticed “once upon a time” is adapted or modified. This is not merely unconventional. It emphasizes that man is subject to time, “river of light” is metaphorical: light flowing as in a river, “windfall” suggests that the splendour of these rivers of light is a windfall, an unexpected prize. Words like green, golden are repeated. “Time let me hail and climb” is echoed in “Time let me play and be”.

The second stanza uses words, like Sabbath and holy to give a religious dimension to boyhood experience of vacation on the farm. It reflects the adult nostalgia for and idealization of childhood.

In the third stanza uses words, “fire green as grass” is queer expression”, “green suggesting intensity and vitality. The boy imagined or fantasized that while he was sleeping at night, the farm was carried away by the owls, and when he woke up, the farm, “like a wandered white with the dew”, came back with “the cock on his shoulder” “Adam and maiden” suggests that the boy thinks of eve as a maiden. His world was like the garden of Eden before the original sin was committed, or the forbidden fruit (“apple”) tasted notice the light abounding and the constant presence of the sun.

“The whinnying green stable” is an example of transferred epithet. Horses, not stables, whinny or neigh and are green or youthful. “The fields of praise” means the fields of Fern Hill for which the boy was all praise connect “the sun grew round that very day ‘and’ the sun born over and over.”

“Lamb white days” suggests bright, pure, and innocent days or time. It is not the colour of the lamb but its virtue that is meant in this curious phrasing, “riding to sleep” is boyish imagination for falling asleep or going to sleep.

“I sang in my chains like the sea” in at once the boy and the poet singing. The simile of the sea is high imaginative. The sea is chained to the moon and the sun, and sings in its waves and tides. The poet is like the sea, the image is glorifying. The sea is eternal, and so, the poet seems to suggest, is the art of poetry. Time’s slave transcends time in this way.