The Importance of Time in Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

“Now I was young and easy under the apple boughs.” (1). In the poem Fern Hill, the poet tries to express the way he felt as a child, laying happily under the trees on a starry night. And by the way he speaks, he seems to do on more than one occasion. Thomas uses colours to illustrate moments in time and to emphasis certain lines to give them more meaning. There is also a strong sense of time displayed in many parts of the poem, time that is both of him as a child and as an adult.

The poet uses the presence of time as a connection to his childhood in many ways, such as when the poet says, “Time let me play and be.” (13). Twice in this poem, the phrase “Time let me” appears, and each time the poet gives a different thing that time allowed him to do, to “hail and climb,” (4) and to “play and be.” (13). Although a major theme in this poem is youth and childhood, there is a fair amount about time passing and growing older displayed, which is illustrated when Thomas writes in the second stanza, “In the sun that is only young once,” (12). This line is the first time we see that youth is not ever lasting and that getting older in inevitable. Another way we are told about the inevitability of getting older, is the presence of past tense verbs such as were and was, which Thomas has placed throughout the poem. A few examples of his past tense verb placings are, “[…] singing as the farm was home,” (11) which is something that indicates that the farm is no longer home to him, and in the end of the second stanza Thomas writes, “And green and gold I was huntsman and herdsman,” (15).

Colour is used in this poem to express different emotions and stages in a person’s life. This symbolism is shown when the poet says, “And as I was green and carefree,” (10). When the poet uses the colour green, it is him making a reference to his childhood. However, at the end of the poem, Thomas uses the colour in a complete different way. He writes, “Time held me green and dying,” (53), and in this case Thomas uses it as a way to tell us how he feels now, looking back on his childhood. The poet also uses gold, or as Thomas puts it, golden, when he does so, he is referring to the height of his youth; which Thomas dramatizes when he writes, “Golden in the heyday of his eyes,” (5), meaning at that point, the poet was the happiest that he could be at that time. In the last stanza Thomas writes, “[…] in the lamb white days,” (46). The significance of “the lamb” is that it is something pure and innocent, which is also what the colour white represents.

Time is one of the most important themes in this poem, because the poem is about time passing and days going by. By the end of the poem, the way time is presented has changed drastically, the poet isn’t speaking as though life is light or happy anymore, and he is speaking as if time is now the enemy, “[…] time would take me” (46), “Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand.” (47). This is a darker tone to the poem, considering that before we heard things like, "And the sun grew round that very day,” (32), and nearer the end, in the last stanza, the poet recites, “In the moon that is always rising,” (48). The poet went from talking about how the sun would rise day in and day out, to speaking of the moon staying high in the sky.

After reading this poem, one of the first questions that came to be was, who won? Was is the poet? Who talked of his glorious adventures as a child that made him happy. Or was it time? Which in the end, managed to take the last thing that the poet had left, his life. It could be debated that time was the winner in the feud, because after all, dying is times ultimate last move. But if you really think and analyse the last three lines in the poem, it will tell you that even though he is dying, he is still singing, “Though I sang in the chains like the sea,” (54). Is he really dead if fifty years after he has passed, people are still sitting and reading this poem?