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Fern Hill (1946), pivotal poem in the career of Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh people poet who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself....
, was the last poem included in his book Deaths and Entrances
Deaths and Entrances

Deaths and Entrances is a volume of poetry by Dylan Thomas, first published in 1946. It became the best-known of his poetry collections.Some of the poems contained in the volume have become classics, notably Fern Hill....
. The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his youthful visits to his aunts:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,


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 scenes from the Garden of Eden.






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Fern Hill (1946), pivotal poem in the career of Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh people poet who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself....
, was the last poem included in his book Deaths and Entrances
Deaths and Entrances

Deaths and Entrances is a volume of poetry by Dylan Thomas, first published in 1946. It became the best-known of his poetry collections.Some of the poems contained in the volume have become classics, notably Fern Hill....
. The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his youthful visits to his aunts:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,


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 scenes from the Garden of Eden. 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.


The poem uses internal
Internal rhyme

In poetry, internal rhyme, or middle rhyme, is rhyme which occurs in a single line of Verse .8D23:06, 9 March 2009 23:06, 9 March 2009 23:06, 9 March 2009 ~O:...
 half rhyme
Half rhyme

Half rhyme, sometimes called slant, sprung, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, off rhyme or imperfect rhyme is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved....
 and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas was very conscious of the impact of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins , was an England poet, Roman Catholicism convert, and Society of Jesus priest, whose 20th-century fame established him posthumously among the leading Victorian poets....
, as exemplified by the complex rhyme scheme of Fern Hill. In the White Giant's Thigh, In Country Sleep and other poems which were constructed in a similar manner.