Poem Analysis: Fern Hill By Dylan Thomas

Fern Hill Explication
Most people of today would agree that they would wish to be younger again. Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, exemplifies this feeling of wishing to return to our days of youth. The poem itself is six stanzas long and is lyrical in structure. The speaker is older and is looking back on his life where he spent his childhood on a farm. He harkens back to how he misses his days of youth and encourages others to enjoy their youth while it lasts.
The first stanza opens up with saying how the speaker was young and did not have a care in the world. The first line talks about him relaxing under an apple bough, which is an apple tree. He also goes on to explain in line two that he is as “happy as the grass was green” (2), which

Stanza three explains what life was like at the farm he lived on, as the previous stanzas have. Line twenty describes the landscape and how beautiful it is. It describes it as Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air,” (20). Lines twenty one through twenty three use more imagery to describe the landscape. They use words such as “lovely and watery” (21) to show how pleasant it was to gaze upon the land. The word “And” is also repeated in the beginning of each of these lines which creates suspense. They also show repetition by repeating words such as “green” and it brings up the starry night again. Line twenty four talks about owls and how they are starting to come out. The day is starting to end and there is still beauty in everything. Now night has begun and all the things that made the day happy and carefree are starting to disappear. Lines twenty five through twenty seven use imagery to show that the moon is appearing and the horses and everything else is disappearing into the night. This begins to show that the youth the speaker is experiencing is starting to

Line thirty seven creates another personification by giving the house emotions: “And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house” (37). Everything is still happy and carefree in the world of the narrator. He is happy under the new day in line thirty eight. In line thirty nine he shows how little attention he paid at the time to what he had. “In the sun born over and over,” (39). Line forty uses the word “heedless” to show how oblivious he was to the easy and happy lifestyle he had when he was young. Line forty two explains how he did not care at the time, “And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows” (42), because he felt that those days would last forever. Line forty three uses the words “so few” to show how the narrator was unaware at the limited time of his youth, and that it would have inevitably come to an end. In line forty four the words “green” and “golden” are used once again. Green and gold represent youth and something being of