Fern Hill

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Fern Hill (1946), pivotal poem in the career of Dylan Thomas, was the last poem included in his Deaths And Entrances. The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his youthful visits to his aunts:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green.

In the middle section the idyllic scene is expanded upon, reinforced by the lilting rhythm of the poem, the dreamlike, pastoral metaphors and allusion to scenes from the Garden of Eden. By the end the poet's older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:

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.^[1]

Unusually, the poem uses internal half rhyme and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas is famous as an extravagantly musical poet, in the vein of Edgar A. Poe and G. Manley Hopkins. Thus the complex rhyme scheme of "Fern Hill" may simply be a by-product of Thomas's style. He composed "In the White Giant's Thigh," "In Country Sleep," and many other poems, in a very similar manner.^[2]