Fern Hill is a six-stanza poem written in 1945 by Welsh poet
Dylan Thomas. It shows the poet engaged in an amazing journey through time and
memory, prompted by his innermost desire to meet his former self and retrieve
the dreamlike time of his youth in the farm. This journey is not a linear one,
as there is an alternation between night and day, light and dark throughout the
poem while the self tries to grasp the core of those moments, which are as
elusive as youth itself. There are as many as six moves, or changes in the
poem, but they do not match the stanzas perfectly as one would suppose in a
first reading. The fourth movement, for instance, drags along two stanzas in
order to reveal the length of a day and the wide adventures the self goes
through. On the other hand, there are two movements comprised in a single
stanza, the last one, which makes the transition to the final action. If we
follow these moves, we can keep pace with the poet’s memory and nostalgia as
they dance along those dreamlike places of yore.
The poem begins at night, with the speaker musing,
remembering under the starlit sky of the unknown valley. He is outdoors, and he
thinks, or dreams about the time when he “was young and easy under the apple
bows”. The past tense of the verb to be suggests that this youth belongs to the
past, that it happened a long time ago and for that very reason, the speaker
miss it dearly. However, the adverb “now” shows that he reload his past
experience, lives it all over again. As he himself says, time allows him to do
that, as long as he remains under “the mercy of his means”, but when we read
that we wonder if that is really an actual youth, lived and spent in its proper
time, or if it is an oneiric youth which is updated every time he remembers.
When he says “[…] honored among wagons I was prince of apple towns” he seems to
be making something up, creating a brand new “reality” out of the ordinary
things of the past, which go through a complete change as they make their way
to his memory. At the end of the first stanza, there is a downward movement
that plucks him out of this airy environment and brings him back to earth and
water, more material, touchable elements.
