Fern Hill

“Fern Hill” is a fond reminiscence of childhood. The speaker is an adult looking back on his boyhood when he spent his summers on a farm. The first stanzas convey a sense of the child’s innocent, unselfconscious unity or harmony with nature, in which he continually delights and exults. The farm is an eternal paradise for him. In Stanza 1, time is evident, but it allows the young boy to feel as if he is lord of all he sees and in which he participates (“time let me hail and climb / Golden” Lines 4-5). He walks “honoured” (Line 6) among the hay wagons and is a “prince” (Line 6) of the apple orchard. Everything in nature seems bathed in light (Line 9).

Stanza 2 continues the same theme. No shadows fall on the boy’s happiness. He is “green” (Lines 10 and 15), which shows he is absorbed within nature’s summer greenery; however, the word may also carry a perhaps unintended underlying meaning of “green,” meaning naïve, innocent, or inexperienced. Regardless, time continues to allow him to “play and be / Golden in the mercy of his means” (Lines 13-14). This is the second occurrence of the word “golden” as applied to the boy, which suggests the radiance of youth. In his own eyes, he is a master of nature; the cattle follow his lead and the foxes keep their distance on the hills. Everything is singing, including the boy. A kind of generalized religious imagery follows, as “the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams” (Lines 17-18).

In the third stanza, the delightful idyll continues all day long under the sun: It is as if it is never going to end. Nighttime carries the same pleasure. While he sleeps, the sounds of nature persist and he seems aware of them all. The coming of the morning is an equal pleasure, he states in Stanza 4. This stanza introduces a new thought—a product of the adult’s mind rather than that of the child. The day is so perfect, shining with its own light, that he thinks this must have been what the Garden of Eden was like “in the first spinning place” (Line 34): a suggestion of how the Earth spins on its own axis, when creation itself was new and pristine, absolutely fresh. It is if he, a young boy on a farm in early-20th-century Wales, was living in paradise just as “Adam and maiden” (Line 30) did “after the birth of the simple light” (Line 33); even the horses are “spellbound” (Line 34) by the magical quality of the day and walk onto fields that are blessed as “fields of praise” (Line 36).

The first part of Stanza 5 continues the idyll. The boy is “honoured among foxes and pheasants” (Line 37), which is an echo of Stanza 1: “And honoured among wagons” (Line 6). The repetition suggests that in the boy’s awareness, nothing is changing. The “new made clouds” (Line 38) do not disturb his happiness, though this is the first time in the poem clouds have been mentioned; they make up just the barest foreshadowing of what will soon come. The next line, “the sun born over and over” (Line 39) suggests the regular passing of days and the reach of time, of which the boy is still unaware. The adult, however, now knows that “such morning songs” (Line 43) in a child’s life are necessarily brief, because time leads children “out of grace” (Line 45); that is, out of its favor: Their magical, carefree days must end.

In Stanza 6, the speaker continues his reflections about the workings of time, framed as a contrast between the adult knowledge he now has and the joy he experienced as a child. The imagery darkens in this stanza. Instead of expansive, outdoors sights and sounds, Line 47 pictures the barn swallows in the loft: They are enclosed, seeking refuge, unlike the owls and nightjars heard in Stanza 3. The phrase “the shadow of my hand” (Line 47) also suggests a darkening of the scene, which now takes place under a rising moon (Line 48)—no mention of the sun here. Line 51 makes the loss explicit: The boy as he wakes is now “fled forever from the childless land.” He can recapture that land only in memory, as in this poem.

The poem moves to a note of melancholy, with the adult’s awareness that in those golden days of childhood, time held him at once “green and dying” (Line 53)—at one with nature but also subject to time’s eternal processes. There is, however, still some joy and acceptance in the final line, “Though I sang in my chains like the sea” (Line 54). Even the mighty. roaring ocean must obey nature's laws, such as the ebb and flow of tides, but both boy and sea celebrate and sing, regardless.