YOUTH AND MEMORY IN DYLAN THOMAS: AN ANALYSIS OF FERN HILL

By Marcos Henrique Silva

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 poets 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.
 The second move sets off right at the beginning of the second stanza. Without a
transition, without any language feature to show the passage of time, the speaker
arises in broad day light, and the sun, as he himself, is in a haste, because it is young
once only. However, he seems to be still at ease, comfortable among the things and
living beings of the farm. Time let him play once more, so much so that he feels in tune
with the animals. There is a peaceable communication between man and beasts,
calves are responsive to the horn and the foxes barked clear and cold. Everything
flows in the air, the element of daydream.
Water drags the self from the second to the third stanza, from day to night, but
he doesnt have the chance to enjoy this nightly hour, because sleep wraps him up like
a mantle and turns everything into dream again, maybe nightmare, as we see in the
images of owls bearing the farm away, and horses flashing into the dark. A
displacement takes place during the night, a dark revolution that kidnaps the physical
world; put it in suspension, so as to let the unfamiliar things take the stand.
However, this movement is all too brief and the farm comes back in the fourth
movement, this time in the figure of the wanderer. It is fresh and new, as if reborn by
the very act of its temporary absence. The way it is described, the farm looks like a
universe created again. It brings the dewdrops, the mark of the morning, and the cock,
the animal that announces the new day. Moreover, the poet mentions Adam and Eve,
which is a clear reference to the Christian creation myth. As he awakes for this glorious
morning, the self needs to go through all those acts of creation that must have been
the task of an architect of the universe. He has to look at the sky and see that it is
gathered again. He needs to set the horses free. When he finally recognizes his dear
old farm, he goes out to live his careless adventures, which are perhaps the most
beautiful lines of the poem:
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 []

Towards the end, the day seems to leap into the last stanza and turns into night as if
by magic. He is so careless that he only notices that night is getting near when he sees
the swallows gathering in the loft, a lovely sign of twilight and one the most beautiful
time transitions that have ever appeared in a poem. He is led towards night by the
shadow of his hand, which is a way to recognize himself as a man that belongs to
reality, no to dream. There is disenchantment in the last lines of this poem, which is
clear in the way the self observes the upward movement of time, the everlasting rise
of the moon. He is not plunged in dream anymore, he is aware that sleep is not a way
to free himself from the yoke of time, to take control of this shining and fleeting youth.
He is the one at the mercy of time, and in this condition life and death are close. The
young man cannot stay away from the dying man because time chains them both as
we can see in the last stanza:

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.

Boy and man meet again at the end of the poem, not by means of a reconciliation, but
through the sudden awareness of their condition, a green and dying human being
arrested by time. All along the poem, we follow the self in his undaunted journey
toward childhood and youth, the gem of his lifetime. We see him floating from night to
morning, to afternoon and back to night, like someone unaffected by time. He is free
to erase the borders between past and present, but he only can do that because
memory gives him a boost and allows him to drift away from reality. However, when
he becomes aware of the cyclic nature of time the moon that is always rising he
realizes that time keeps him in chains and that he can only be young and easy in the
mercy of his means. In a sense, lyrical expression is the only way to get free, if
temporarily, of those chains as it is the very place where time awareness and memory
get together to bring back those ideal periods of life that the self misses so much.