How do you feel about the poem "Fern Hill"?

By dylan thomas

How do you feel about the poem "Fern Hill"?
Except for a few of e e cummings' poems (like "in Just- / spring . . ."), I think this is the very best poem of childhood in the English language: "Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs / . . . happy as the grass was green."





But, more important to me, this is a poem of MY childhood, for I was this child; I, too, ". . . was green and carefree, famous among the barns / About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home . . . ." Oh, yes, I, too, rode those "spellbound horses walking warm / Out of the whinnying green stable / On to the fields of praise."





Until I was five, I too lived on such a farm. I, too, "ran my heedless ways, . . . // And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades . . . ." How well I remember. The farm was called Ebenezer, and I was called by a name I have never since been called by, a name I gave myself in my own tongue.





Time changes all. The farm is deserted now, owned by a developer; the house I lived in has long since been demolished; my friends have moved away; the adults who made me "prince of the apple towns," "huntsman and herdsman," have all passed on.





But Dylan Thomas was, oh, so right about time passing. Long before my childhood farm gave way to the modern era, I would "wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land." When I was five we moved away from this happy farm. My mother became ill, my father had to work far away from home; I lived with relatives, and (maybe worst of all) I had to start to a consolidated school. And, when I was five, the War began.





I was never a happy child again, "young and easy, "green and carefree, famous among the barns." I became an outsider. Grief and fear and loneliness and embarrassment and shame and timidity and lack of confidence became my childhood homes. And (thank God!) a vivid imagination.





When my own children came along, I worked hard to preserve what was "green and golden" longer for them. But, alas, try as hard as we may, time eventually has his day: "time allows / In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs / Before the children green and golden / Follow him out of grace."





But Memory preserves our Ebenezer for us. Though as children we were already "green and dying," -- even so,





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.





Dylan Thomas's two best poems speak for us at both ends of our earthly lives:





Do not go gentle into that good night.
Reply:Haven't read it so I couldn't really tell you. Sorry.