Fern Hill

The poem Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas, is about person's life from childhood to his eventual death. My reaction to the poem at first was confusion. But with repeated reading, more clarity was reached. In the work of a critic, named Thomas Steele, the interpretation derived from the poem resembled mine in most of the points. The two major points of Fern Hill that we both agreed upon is what the poem is actually about, and the passage of time. These two subjects are major themes in Fern Hill. The beginning stanzas of the poem are devoted to the childhood of the narrator. The narrator seems to describe a time of happiness and joy. He talks about a small village and how he loved to dream. When the narrator says, "I was prince of the apple towns," (line 6), it is just an example that shows how the narrator dreamed and used his imagination as a child. Steele confirms that the narrator's childhood was good by saying, "The boy's life is composed of repetition of the cycles of nature" (1). From all the information perceived in the start of the poem, and confirmed by Steele in his critique, the childhood of the narrator was joyful and pleasant. In the later stanzas of the poem, the narrator begins to realize that he has become an adult, and become much older. Death cannot be avoided. And the narrator finally sees this. Steele's work seems to have the same idea when it says, "The experience of graceless adulthood is inevitable" (1). The narrator realizes that if he is an adult, then his childhood has been stolen from him. The innocence that childhood brings is always lost. You become an adult, and more things become difficult. After adulthood comes death, and there is no way to avoid it. The passage of time is another one of the major themes of Fern Hill. During the narrator's childhood, to him there seemed to be no passage of time. Time seemed to stand still and not affect him at all. This is an idea that is true to real life as well. When we are children, at least