Fern Hill (1946) is a poem by Dylan Thomas—the last poem included in his book 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]

The poem uses internal half rhyme and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas was very conscious of the impact of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He always denied having conscious knowledge of Welsh, but "his lines chime with internal consonantal correspondence, or cynghanedd, a prescribed feature of Welsh versification".^[2]

[edit] Musical composition

Fern Hill has been set to music by the American composer John Corigliano, for SATB chorus with orchestral accompaniment.^[3] FERN HILL

     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 as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns     About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,       In the sun that is young once only,         Time let me play and be       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. 

     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       And playing, lovely and watery         And fire green as grass.       And nightly under the simple stars     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. 

     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,         The sky gathered again       And the sun grew round that very 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. 

     And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house     Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,       In the sun born over and over,         I ran my heedless ways,       My wishes raced through the house high hay     And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows     In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs       Before the children green and golden         Follow him out of grace. 

     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. 

[edit] References

1. ^ Dylan Thomas on BBC Wales Arts page
2. ^ Seymour H Sound and Form in Modern Poetry page 255
3. ^ Providence Singers Musical background notes

• The Life and Work of Dylan Thomas (archive)

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