Fern Hill Essay Research Paper The poem

Fern Hill Essay, Research Paper

The poem “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas explores childhood memories and the

melancholy reality of lost youth. “Fern Hill” compels the reader to come back over and

over again to seek more insight into the joy and pleasure of a time of innocence lost. The

figurative speech causes the reader to seek the elusive youth and boyhood days of the

character and encourages the reader to mourn and celebrate with the writer for the once

glorious days of his youth.

From the opening line, the memories of boyhood days are revealed. The writer

recalls his carefree life. A beautiful playground, a wooded valley full of apple orchards

and fresh green meadows, which bring the boy great happiness, “happy as the grass was

green”, can be visualized. Each line is full of boyhood memories. The boy, as many

young innocent boys do, pretends many things in his playground, his cloistered world. It

is his golden time, his “heyday” to be young and carefree, to pretend to be “prince of the

apple towns”. There is a sense of such joy in this time in his life; he sings, happily in

his home on the farm. And yet amidst this joyful memory, is a sense of sadness as we

realize youth and innocence does not last. This reality and sadness begins to become

mingled with the joyful memory as we read, “in the sun that is young once only, time let

me play and be golden in the mercy of his means”. Blended with this awareness of

reality, more boyhood memories are offered; memories of pretending to be”huntsman

and herdsman”. All our senses are beckoned into the pleasures of this joyful time in the

boys life, we are invited to hear the sounds of the calves singing and the foxes barking

clearly and coldly, as

he plays his horn. We are welcomed to sense the lovely calmness of sabbath days that

seem to be slow and quiet as a babbling brook. We are encouraged to visualize the “hay

fields, as high as the house”; to hear the sounds of the wind whistling through the