First of all, thanks sooo much to those of you who came out for our Candlelight Chat this Sunday with Kate Bowler, bestselling author of Joyful, Anyway. We talked about Kate’s years of living with incurable cancer, her father’s crippling depression all through Kate’s childhood and their enduringly close relationship — and how to feel joy, whether or not your life is going well.
Kate is a being of grace, humor and poetry, and it was a rare treat to spend time with her.
If you missed it, fear not! We will send all Quiet Life members the video replay in a few days, and you can watch it as many times as you like!
Today, I want to share with you one of my favorite poems: “Fern Hill”, by Dylan Thomas. I was reminded of it by a guy named Cian McCarthy, who notes that this poem is “such poignant reading as we stand on the cusp of early Autumn.” We are all growing older, the seasons remind us, even when we’re young.
I hope you find this poem as incalculably beautiful as I do. And if you feel, at first, that you can’t understand exactly what Dylan Thomas is saying, try to just relax into the words and images, and the meaning will come through loud and clear: especially the glorious final stanza, which gives me goosebumps no matter how many times I read it.
Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
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.”
Here, too, is a wonderful meditation on the poem, from America magazine, by Jayme Stayer:
“To understand this poem, you don’t need biography [of Thomas]. Your own personal understanding of the loss of innocence and the pain of mortality serve just as well as Thomas’s disastrous attempts at adulting. But to understand how this poem and a few others avoid the pitfalls of his other work, the biographical background is illuminating.
The context that matters is not that Thomas spent summers as a child on a farm—any decent artist could have invented such a childhood. The more relevant context is the yawning gap between the child and the adult. Thomas’s youthful summers were idyllic, and his adult fall was low and sordid: alcoholism, adultery, financial insecurity, emotional instability, professional uncertainty, neglected responsibilities. Observing that gap, he feels the pain of lost innocence more than any stable adult might feel it. “Fern Hill” is an aching cry that turns both the observation and the feeling to artistic account, creating a childhood that is too perfect to be believed. When he is plumbing his own grief and nostalgia, rather than posing as an oracle, Thomas strikes the true lyric note, singing in his chains like the sea.”
*Did you love this poem too? Which are your favorite lines?
(For me, there are so many of them. But “the sabbath rang slowly/In the pebbles of the holy streams” is just a marvel. And “the whinnying green stable” and the “fields of praise”….and then the “farm forever fled from the childless land” - OMG.)
Must be a beautiful coincidence that you shared this on the day we've learned of the passing of Wendell Berry. His life story is not like that of this poem's author (which I read after reading the poem), but I couldn't help thinking of Wendell on his farm. May he rest in the peace of wild things.
The "whinnying green barn" is a barn in its active living years filled with the sounds and the moisture-giving litter & mire of the barn's animals. They breathe moisture out and into the wood keeping it strong, supple, flexible. When a barn ages and is emptied of its livestock, the wood dries, shrinks, cracks, and falls to decay. Becoming too weak to weather harsh winters and heavy rain. Even the sunshine adds to its demise. These, of course, are the barns of yesteryear whose boards and beams have ingrained the character of the farmer, the farm's history of good years and bad, and the spirits of all it has held.