Fern Hill

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"Fern Hill" (1945) is a poem by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, first published in Horizon magazine in October 1945, with its first book publication in 1946 as the last poem in Deaths and Entrances .

Contents

Creation

Thomas had started writing Fern Hill in New Quay, Cardiganshire, where he lived from September 4, 1944, to July 1945. [1] Further work was done on the poem in July and August 1945 at Blaencwm, the family cottage in Carmarthenshire, Wales. A draft was sent to a friend in late August, [2] and then the completed poem to his publisher on September 18, 1945. [3]

The house Fernhill is a Grade 2 listed residence just outside Llangain [4] in Carmarthenshire. In Thomas' day, it had an orchard and fifteen acres [5] of farmland, most of it of poor quality. [6] Thomas had extended stays here in the 1920s with his aunt Annie and her husband, Jim Jones. They had lived at Fernhill from about 1908 to 1928, renting it from the daughter of Robert Ricketts Evans (also known as Robert Anderson Evans), an occasional hangman and public executioner [7] who once lived in Fernhill. [8] Thomas’ own notes about Fernhill confirm that he knew the various stories about Evans the Hangman. [9]

Thomas wrote about Fernhill (calling it Gorsehill) in his short story, The Peaches, in which he describes it as a ramshackle house of hollow fear. Fernhill's dilapidated farmyard and buildings are also described in The Peaches. [10] Jim Jones had shown little interest in farming, as his neighbours had noticed: there was “no work in him...left Fernhill farm to ruins.” [11] Jim had sold most of his farming machinery, implements and livestock before moving to Fernhill. [12] He'd also been convicted for allowing decomposing animal carcasses to lie around his fields. [13]

Fernhill, said an official survey, [14] had an outside earth closet, water was carried in from a well in the farmyard, washing oneself was done in the kitchen, whilst meals were cooked on an open fire. Its two living rooms were lit by candles and paraffin lamps. The house, said the survey, had “extreme rising dampness” and smelt, wrote Thomas in The Peaches, "of rotten wood and damp and animals". [15]

Thomas' holidays here have been recalled in interviews with his schoolboy friends and with Annie and Jim's neighbours. [16] A further account describes both Thomas’ childhood and later years on the family farms between Llangain and Llansteffan, as well as suggesting that the poem Fern Hill was inspired not just by the house Fernhill but by another farm as well. [17]

Linguistic considerations

The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his childhood visits to his Aunt Annie's farm:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,

In the middle section, the idyllic scene is expanded upon, reinforced by the lilting rhythm of the poem, the dreamlike, pastoral metaphors and allusion to Eden.

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...
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

By the end, the poet's older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:

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. [18]

The poem uses internal half rhyme and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas was very conscious of the effect of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He always denied having conscious knowledge of Welsh, but "his lines chime with internal consonantal correspondence, or cynghanedd , a prescribed feature of Welsh versification". [19]

Legacy

Fern Hill has been set to music by the American composer John Corigliano, for SATB chorus with orchestral accompaniment. [20]

Samples of the Fern Hill poem read by Dylan Thomas himself are used in the track Apple Towns [21] by the one-man act Reflection Nebula. [22]

Happy as the Grass Was Green became the title of a 1973 drama film.

Canadian performer Raffi transformed the poem as a song called "Up on Fernhill" on his 2002 album: "Let's Play!"

American band Yeah Yeah Yeahs incorporated the last verses of the poem into the lyrics of the song "Blacktop" from their 2022 album Cool It Down.

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References

  1. ↑ See (1) C. Fitzgibbon (1965) The Life of Dylan Thomas, p.266, Little-Brown. (2) C. Thomas (1986) Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas, p92, Secker and Warburg. (3) P. Ferris (1999) Dylan Thomas: The Biography, p.4, J. M. Dent.
  2. ↑ On August 28, 1945, to David Tennant. See P. Ferris ed. (2000) The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, p. 629, J. M. Dent.
  3. ↑ To A.J. Hoppe, a Dent director. See P. Ferris ed. op.cit. p.633
  4. ↑ H. Williams (2007) The Book of Llangain: from farming community to residential village, Halsgrove
  5. ↑ 1910 Land Tax Survey, Carmarthenshire County Archives
  6. ↑ Much of Fernhill’s farmland had been taken over by reeds and, on the high ground above the house, fern and gorse. For more on the quality of Fernhill’s land, see Note 48 in A True Childhood: Dylan’s Peninsularity by D. N. Thomas in Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration ed. H. Ellis, Bloomsbury, 2014 and online at
  7. ↑ On Evans' role as a hangman between 1873 and 1875, see UK hangmen
  8. ↑ See chapter 5 of D. N. Thomas, (2003) Dylan Remembered 1914-1934, vol. 1, Seren.
  9. ↑ See P. Ferris (1999) Dylan Thomas: The Biography, p.340, Dent. See also John Brinnin’s account of Thomas recounting these stories on a visit to Fernhill: Dylan Thomas in America (1955) p.241, Avon.
  10. ↑ The Peaches was published in October 1938 in Life and Letters Today and in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (J. M. Dent, 1940).
  11. ↑ D. N. Thomas (2003) op.cit. p213.
  12. ↑ See The Carmarthen Journal of September 18, 1908 at:Pentowin sale
  13. ↑ See The Carmarthen Journal of October 9, 1908 at:Jim's conviction
  14. ↑ Rural Housing Inspection Report, 1945, Carmarthenshire County Archives
  15. ↑ For more, see D. N. Thomas (2003) op.cit., p203.
  16. ↑ D N Thomas (2003) op.cit. pp43-56
  17. ↑ A True Childhood: Dylan’s Peninsularity by D. N. Thomas in Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration ed. H. Ellis, Bloomsbury, 2014 and online at
  18. ↑ Dylan Thomas on BBC Wales Arts page
  19. ↑ Seymour H Sound and Form in Modern Poetry page 255
  20. ↑ Providence Singers Archived 28 February 2019 at the Wayback Machine Musical background notes
  21. ↑ "Apple Towns".
  22. ↑ "Reflection Nebula".
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