Dylan Thomas was a difficult person. But ‘Fern Hill’ is a perfect poem.

Editors’ note: This essay is part of a series by Father Jayme Stayer, S.J., a professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, reflecting on essential works of writing, art and music. Other essays can be found at americamagazine.org.

I love nothing more than a good biography, preferably a door-stopper the size of a Crock-Pot. Steaming with detail, juicy biographies of authors and composers fill my bookshelves. (Related guilty pleasure: memoirs of opera divas who are out to settle scores.) What is it that makes artist biographies irresistible?

For me, it is their unique combination of history, gossip, psychology and exegesis. Some years ago, I inhaled A. David Moody’s three-volume, 1,700-page biography of Ezra Pound over the course of a few weeks. That I kept stopping to take notes was the only reason I couldn’t read faster. I start an artist’s biography because I know something of their work and want to know more. I finish most biographies in a similar state: with an enlarged view of the artist’s motivations and context, and a desire to absorb more of their work. 

This is not the reaction I had to Andrew Lycett’s Dylan Thomas: A New Life. There have been a handful of Thomas’s poems that I’ve loved and taught for decades. I had hoped that reading a biography would advance me to other poems. But even though I have a high tolerance for artists who are jerks, this biography diminished my view of the artist and his art. 

Thomas was a man whose natural bent was sweetness and charm, but he spent most of his adulthood in a drunken stupor, constantly biting the hands that fed him—vomiting in their fireplaces, insulting their kindness—and frequently cheating on his wife. After a spectacular bout of drinking at the White Horse Tavern in New York City, he died at St. Vincent’s Hospital at the age of 39. Other biographies note that Thomas was affectionate with his children; but a father who is emotionally distant, regularly drunk, often violent and then entirely dead does more damage than good. His wife, Caitlin, was an equally self-destructive narcissist. The account of their marriage reads like an affair of two monstrous adolescents. (A Jesuit friend who grew up in Swansea, Wales, near the Thomas home, recalls stories of the Thomases’ crockery-smashing fights, which began, predictably, in pubs.) 

Thomas did have a stable of friends and admirers who clung to him even in the worst of times, so he must have had a gift for friendship that went beyond his party tricks of mimicry and bawdy stories. Interestingly, there is a documentary of Caitlin Thomas’s recollections of her first husband. It was filmed late in her life, after she had undertaken a 12-step program, and the result is edifying. Sober and witty, she offers a clear-eyed view of her own and her husband’s failings. (Search YouTube for Vincent Kane’s interview with Caitlin, “The Leftover Wife,” from 1977.)

Lycett helped me realize why three decades of owning a collection of Thomas’s poems had not moved me beyond the few that I already loved. What I had hoped were undiscovered gems turned out to be nonsensical gibberish. As a writer, Thomas had no serious ideas he wanted to express, only a wan spirituality that waffled between atheistic humanism and benign voodoo, a politics that felt like kindergarten socialism, a sentimental love of humankind, and an abhorrence of war and suffering. 

He had some murky ideas about the unity of life and the contiguity of growth and destruction. But it’s all pretty thin stuff compared with the towering intellects of Eliot, Woolf, Moore, Yeats and Auden. Thomas was intellectually incurious, bored easily and aggrieved about his lack of a university education. He had instinctive rather than explicit aesthetic ideas, and his detestation of other writers was rooted in jealous insecurity rather than artistic principle. His primary desires were to play with language and perform in a resonant baritone. 

In a course on modernist poetry that I taught last semester, I played a recording of Thomas reading his poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” The poem has no ideas in it other than the claim in the title. A hundred questions open up from this claim: If death does not have the last word, then what does? Is it love, resurrection, karmic cycles, Yeatsian reincarnation, absorption into the Welt-Atem? And why does death ultimately fail? How does it happen? Who can opt in or out? 

Thomas is uninterested in exploring any such questions. Instead, the poem revels in gaudy, lavish wordiness and strange obscurities. However, it is still a poem that haunts. One of my students was besotted with the poem, and her memorized performance of it burned through the ceiling tiles of the classroom. Kvetch as you will, there’s no denying Thomas’s power.

This is all a rather ambivalent set-up for Thomas’s “Fern Hill”—which I concede is an exquisitely perfect poem. Like all his verse, it is primarily an aural rather than an intellectual experience. There is exactly one obvious allusion—to the creation stories in Genesis. The poem requires no historical or biographical context to illuminate it meaningfully, although one relevant detail is that the poem draws on Thomas’s memories of childhood summers spent at Fern Hill, his aunt’s farm in Wales. 

The speaker begins with a recollection of himself as a child on the farm:

It won’t do to skim such poetry. Editing out the wordiness to get to the ideas short-circuits the poem’s magic. Adjectives get transferred willy-nilly: “Lilting” surely describes the boy’s aimlessly happy movements, yet here the adjective is ascribed to the house. John Ruskin took a dim view of such moves, dubbing them the “pathetic fallacy”—the attribution of human emotion to landscapes or objects. (Many great authors ignore Ruskin’s prohibition.) 

The formulation “happy as the grass was green” seems caught halfway between a simile and a grammatical analogy. The simile “happy as the grass” suggests another pathetic fallacy: Is it “I am to happy as grass is to green)? Or is it “I was happy because the grass was green?”

Whatever the semantic ambiguity here, it makes perfect sense as a nursery rhyme. In his imaginative play, the boy figures himself “honoured among wagons” (his retinue) and as “prince of the apple towns” (his kingdom). It is not nature that has draped the trees with hanging trim, but the god-like boy himself: “I lordly had the trees and leaves/ Trail with daisies and barley/ Down the rivers of the windfall light.” 

Poetic structure

This is a poem about a lost paradise, being cast out of Eden forever. Note the last two words of the first stanza: “windfall light.” They seem to refer to the leaves and vines that stream from the trees. But the words also evoke Genesis: Wind and light are images of God. Tucked between them is the Fall. The enemy in this paradise is not an evil serpent, but personified, capital-T Time. His danger is not yet noticed by the child, who is “young and easy,” and whom Time—like an indulgent parent—allows to “hail and climb/ Golden in the heydays of his eyes.” Time appears throughout the poem, capitalized at the beginning of lines, lowercase elsewhere, alternating between an unremarkable noun and a menacing abstraction.

The second stanza repeats the same form as the first: no end rhymes, no regular rhythm. But the line lengths are repeated, with lines 1-2 and 6-7 in something like hexameter (six stresses), while lines 3-5 and 8-9 are shorter in each stanza. The terraced indentations provide visual clues to the form. Here is more evocation of the child’s imagination coloring his play among the barns and animals. Brooding Time is still there, not yet troublesome but allowing the child to “play and be/ Golden in the mercy of his means” and allowing his play beyond the threat of mortality.

The third stanza describes more pastoral scenery, with tuneful alliteration: “hay/ Fields high as the house”—an image that returns later as “house high hay.” The boy recalls each night when the farm would disappear: “As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away.” One of my students described this line in the language of child development: The boy has not yet learned object permanence. Groggily falling asleep to the sounds of hooting, he naïvely believes that every night the owls carry the farm somewhere else.

Equally miraculously, another bird (this time a rooster) summons the farm back every morning, like a traveler returning: “And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white/ With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder.” The Genesis allusion is made explicit: “it was all/ Shining, it was Adam and maiden.” The farm in summer is so achingly perfect that the speaker likens it to the beginning of creation itself: “So it must have been after the birth of the simple light/ In the first, spinning place.” The inevitable fall from grace has been prefigured since the very first line of the poem, with its reference to “apple boughs.” But it has been delayed by the boy’s innocence and Time’s forbearance. Even in the fifth stanza, the sun’s daily revolutions are not yet signs of mortality but of rebirth: “In the sun born over and over,/ I ran my heedless ways.” 

But his heedlessness cannot last. Near the end of the fifth stanza, time begins to assert his power. The turn in the poem—that moment when the logic or emotion switches to another register—happens subtly, with the phrase “so few”: 

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,

The two primary colors of the poem, green and golden, signify, respectively: nature, life, health; and value, purity, perfection. But these “children green and golden”—healthy, living, perfect—have no choice but to follow time “out of grace,” out of Eden, into the realities of what Walt Whitman calls “this soiled world.”

The speaker recalls his innocence now in light of its disappearance: “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.” Here are yet more birds, swallows signifying hope and spring. But time (not “Time”) leads the child up into the barn’s loft by the “shadow” of his hand: darkness, sin, ambiguity.

“Riding to sleep,” the speaker does not hear the familiar owls carrying the farm away; rather, it is time who “fl[ies] with the high fields.” This change means that he will not wake to the rooster and the reborn farm. He wakes instead “to the farm forever fled from the childless land.” No farm, no innocence, no childhood. In the closing lines, the culmination of the Fall hits with dramatic force:

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.

Earlier in the poem, the “mercy” of Time had been forbearance, as he patiently leaves the boy alone. But in retrospect, the speaker realizes that Time had never left him alone. All along, it had “held” him “green and dying”—both living and mortal. Time with a capital-T had always been drawing the “chains” of mortality around the oblivious boy, who sang in his innocence “like the sea”—a symbol of the unconscious, of what is vast, eternal and undiscovered.

Dylan Thomas has always been ranked as a minor poet. In spite of new, critical editions of his work, his reputation has fallen even further in the 21st century. The modernist poetry anthology I use in the classroom has no space for even a single poem of Thomas’s. Nevertheless, there’s an important difference between a minor poet and a forgettable one. The most widely read poet in 19th-century America was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Who reads him now? By contrast, a minor poet still has something to contribute.

Sometimes the weakness of an artist can be turned to great effect. Lotte Lehmann, the great German soprano of the early 20th century, had weak breath support—a rather incapacitating problem for an opera singer. But Lehmann startled connoisseurs by adding catch breaths, creating two or three arcs within a long line where no one else had needed to breathe. She did it so artistically that it seemed natural, as if she were illustrating something new about the melody rather than compensating for a weakness.

One of Thomas’s weaknesses, a “semantic vagueness” (David Perkins’s complaint), here works as nursery rhyme logic, which befits a poem about childhood. Other weaknesses include a bardic pose that borders on demagoguery, and a high rhetorical style that is musty and overdone. This style—his sensual layering of sound, his romanticized nostalgia—suggests that Thomas is a child of the Victorian era, a near-relative of Gerard Manley Hopkins, rather than of the prickly, brainy modernists who were his contemporaries. But in this poem, at least, his high rhetorical style and the extravagances of alliteration and assonance reflect a childlike wonder at the world. 

To understand this poem, you don’t need biography. Your own personal understanding of the loss of innocence and the pain of mortality serve just as well as Thomas’s disastrous attempts at adulting. But to understand how this poem and a few others avoid the pitfalls of his other work, the biographical background is illuminating. 

The context that matters is not that Thomas spent summers as a child on a farm—any decent artist could have invented such a childhood. The more relevant context is the yawning gap between the child and the adult. Thomas’s youthful summers were idyllic, and his adult fall was low and sordid: alcoholism, adultery, financial insecurity, emotional instability, professional uncertainty, neglected responsibilities. Observing that gap, he feels the pain of lost innocence more than any stable adult might feel it. “Fern Hill” is an aching cry that turns both the observation and the feeling to artistic account, creating a childhood that is too perfect to be believed. When he is plumbing his own grief and nostalgia, rather than posing as an oracle, Thomas strikes the true lyric note, singing in his chains like the sea.

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