Monday, March 31, 2008
Fern Hill
The second time I read this poem I focused on the idea of "time." From the first line of the poem the speaker says "Now as I was young," suggests that he is older and looking back on memories of his past. The speaker say's that he was happy ("happy as the grass was green") and that "time let me hail and climb." Therefore, there is two references on the idea of time. First he is living in the current time, thinking about the past. And secondly, while in the memories of his past he say's how it was "time" that made him free. The speaker then goes on to talk about the farm and the farm environment from the perspective of authority. He uses the words lord and prince as if he has some authority in his surroundings. The speaker again refers to time, in the second stanza when he says "time let me play and be golden in the mercy of his means." Here again time gives him freedom and happiness. Then the poem goes on to discuss God and the relation between the divine and farmland and sense of home the speaker feels. But in the last stanza of the poem the mood shifts to a different perspective on time, one of dissapointment to the realization that the time that made him feel free and happy is not infinite and will come to an end and that makes him feel trapped instead of free. I liked how subtly the poet says this when he says "In the moon that is always rising...Time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea." So here the poet shifts his mood yet again to now knowing the reality that life is not infinite and he will at some point, possibly soon, die but he lived his life on the farm to the best and got all the life out of it. Great poem.
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In this poem, the speaker treats Time like a person who has been merciful to him in his younger days. He reminisces about being young, carefree, and happy, simply enjoying being in a farm setting. He equates the pureness of the farm, the "wanderer white" to the Garden of Eden with all its newness: "So it must have been after the birth of the simple light / In the first, spinning place." If the speaker knew, when young, of how Time would "take me / Up to the swallow throunged loft by the shadow of my hand," then he didn't care or let it get in the way of him enjoying life. Even though he knew, or knows now, that he was trapped in time and that it all must end eventually, he still "sang in [his] chains like the sea."
One thing I like about this poem is how Thomas uses unusual combinations of words to evoke strong images. For example, at the end of the third stanza, he describes the night: "All the moon long I heard, blessed among the stables, the night-jars / Flying with the ricks..." For the first phrase, a clearer way of putting it would be "All the night long," which gives us the indirect image of the moon, but "All the moon long" is a more in-your-face way of bringing it up. I had to look up both "night-jar" and "rick," thinking both were birds, but only the former was. (Another name for it is "goatsucker," but thankfully Thomas chose the kinder name for this image.) A rick is apparently a kind of haystack. Hay appears often in this poem, described as being "house high" so it certainly could be on the same level as a flying night-jar, but no bird can fly "with" a stack of hay. But as "around" or "over" could not have done, "with" makes me think of these night-jars flying all around where this hay is which might be blowing around on the wind, the birds maybe only discernible by their voices in the darkness. The word "with," though not strictly logical, connects these two things more closely.
I also noticed the weird phrasing he used throughout the poem, such as “once below a time,” and “all the sun long,” although I was not really sure what he was trying to accomplish by phrasing them that way. I thought the poem was beautiful though, especially the last stanza where he is starts off with the line “nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me…” This line is wonderfully writing as a sort of rhythmic chant that becomes all the more clearer when I listened to him reading it. The last to line, to me, are the most powerful of the poem as they evoke such a strong sense of imagery. With, “time held me green and dying” I saw it as a kind of classic movie scene where a man is holding his lover who is about to die, which I thought was a unique way to view the common theme of death. “Though I sang in my chains like the sea” also evokes a strong image in my mind, ending the poem on a strong and powerful note. In this way he is saying that he does not feel confined by Time; he will embrace it and make the most of it.
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