Fern Hill


Fern Hill is a poem by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, first published in the October, 1945, Horizon magazine, with its first book publication as the last poem in Deaths and Entrances.
The house Fernhill is just outside Llangain in Carmarthenshire, Wales. Thomas had extended stays here in the 1920s with his aunt Annie and her husband, Jim Jones, and wrote about the house in his short story, The Peaches. His holidays here have been recalled in interviews with his schoolboy friends, and both the house and the Thomas family network in the area are detailed in the same book. A further account describes both Thomas’ childhood and later years on the family farms between Llangain and Llansteffan, as well as questioning whether the poem Fern Hill was inspired by the house Fernhill.

Linguistic considerations

The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his childhood visits to his Aunt Annie's farm:
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.
By the end, the poet's older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:
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".

Legacy

Fern Hill has been set to music by the American composer John Corigliano, for SATB chorus with orchestral accompaniment.
Samples of the Fern Hill poem read by Dylan Thomas himself are used in the track Apple Towns by the one-man act Reflection Nebula.
Happy as the Grass Was Green became the title of a 1973 drama film.