Fern Hill

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1945

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Authorial Context

Dylan Thomas, his biographers agree, enjoyed a happy childhood. From when he was very young until he was 11 years old, he spent his summer holidays at Fern Hill where his uncle and aunt, Jack and Ann Jones, were tenants. Ann, it seems, did most of the work to maintain the farm, which was located near the village of Llangynog in the county of Carmarthenshire, in southwest Wales. The Jones’s kept pigs, cows, and chicken and made much of their modest living from selling butter. By the mid-1920s their tenancy had ended, however, and they moved on; so, when Thomas wrote “Fern Hill,” he was recalling memories from more than 20 years’ earlier.

Thomas was a careful craftsman, and accumulated 200 worksheets for this poem, as his biographer Paul Ferris notes. As far as the finished product is concerned, Thomas told Marguerite Caetani—his wealthy American patron—he was quite pleased with it; it was among half a dozen of his poems that “came nearer to what I had in heart and mind and muscle when first I wished to write them” (Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas, edited by Constantine Fitzgibbon, 1966, p. 338). He did however, confide to John Malcolm Brinnin, an American poet who arranged Thomas’s reading tours of the United States in the early 1950s, that he disliked the line “I ran my heedless ways” (Line 40). Thomas said he thought the poem should not have been published with that line in it, but months of thought had not produced a better one. “…ran my heedless ways!—that’s bloody bad,” Thomas said, according to Brinnin (Dylan Thomas in America, 1971, p. 105), although he did not say why it was so bad, or if he did, Brinnin did not record this explanation.

Historical Context

When Thomas began publishing his poems in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the leading English poet. Other well-known poets at that time included Stephen Spender, Louis MacNiece, and Cecil Day-Lewis. All these poets were interested in the social and political events of the day and adopted a left-wing viewpoint. Thomas, however, was never interested in politics, and his poems focused on the elemental realities of human life, including birth, death, and sexuality. If the dominant poets of the decade had a cerebral approach, Thomas stood out as more of a romantic. He was also known to make disparaging remarks about all the above mentioned poets.

By the mid-1940s, however, when “Fern Hill” was published in Deaths and Entrances, Thomas found himself more in step with some emergent English poetry trends. Auden had moved to the United States and his influence on English poetry was not as strong as it had been in the 1930s. In 1939, a poetry anthology titled The New Apocalypse, edited by poets Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry, largely ignored the social and political poems of the 1930s to favor a more lyrical poetry that included mythic and surrealistic elements. Two more anthologies followed, The White Horseman (1941) and Crown and Sickle (1944), and the rather short-lived Apocalyptic movement was established. Poets who were drawn to this movement often admired Thomas’s work, though he kept his distance from them since he had no interest in being part of a literary group. Later in the decade, the Apocalyptic movement overlapped with what some called New Romanticism and included poets such as George Barker, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, and, according to some, Thomas. Again, however, the solitary “rhymer in the long tongued room” (“Poem on His Birthday”) chose to remain aloof. Neither the Apocalyptics nor the New Romantics lasted as identifiable movements into the 1950s when a new poetry movement simply known as "The Movement," emerged in England.