Fern Hill

The adult speaker knows, of course, that childhood cannot last forever, and despite the joyful, apparently timeless childhood he recreates in memory, time is actually present in the poem from the beginning. At first it wears a benevolent face. It gives the boy a kind of special dispensation that allows him to be unaware of it, at least in its larger context, beyond each day’s passage from day to night: “Time let me hail and climb” (Line 4) is repeated with a variation in Line 13, “Time let me play.” In other words, time holds its power in abeyance; it is not yet ranged as an antagonist of the boy in his blissful state of childhood. There is, however, just a hint of what will come in the phrase “Time let me […] climb, / Golden,” suggesting the child climbs (flourishes) like the sun, which climbs the sky in the morning but also goes down in the evening. This hint, however, is not yet to be developed, because time is showing to the boy “the mercy of his means” (Line 13). For the moment, time seems almost prepared to stop. Indeed, this is cleverly conveyed in Stanza 1 as the adult states that the period in his life he is about to describe took place “once below a time” (Line 7)—an obvious play on the fairy tale opening, “Once upon a time.” Thomas’s phrase “below a time” neatly suggests that his experience took place somehow out of time, not subject to time. At least, that was how it seemed to the boy, who had no concept of the long passage of time over the years. It is this sense of an eternal summer that contributes to the air of enchantment and delight filling the first four stanzas and reaching into the fifth.

Nevertheless, time lurks; it may stay its hand for a while, but in Stanza 5 it reappears with a vengeance. All along, time has set limits that cannot be overruled; it “allows / In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs” (Line 43) before all children must follow the path it lays down to adulthood. Time is personified in these final two stanzas as an inflexible male figure, referred to as “he” and “him.” Time is no longer permissive; it no longer, the speaker says of the boy, “let me play” (Line 13) but instead “held me” (Line 53). He realizes that all along time held him “green and dying” (Line 53): Every passage of the sun across the sky that brought him such delight (“all the sun long it was running it was lovely,” Line 19), brought him closer to “the childless land” (Line 51) of adulthood, and what lies beyond even that.