Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas)

Dylan Thomas is a Welsh poet who lived from 1914-1953. Since we are doing a few poems by Dylan Thomas in a row, I went to look up Dylan Thomas in a few books. My favorite introductory blurb is in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (pp. 901-903), and I am going to type up some excerpts for you.

"Dylan Thomas used to say in his American readings that his poems had to be read either very soft or very loud...He liked to speak of his poems as narratives. Each poem, he said, was to be 'a formally watertight compartment of words, preferably with a main moving column (i.e. narrative) to hold a little of the real causes and forces of the creative brain and body.'

"At the root of his poetry is a sense of doubleness, of womb and tomb [that is, birth and death]...[A]s he wrote in a letter, "I make one image--though 'make' is not the word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess--let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred of out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."

I like that description. I know it is difficult to read; don't worry if you don't understand it completely. The biggest things I learned from it are that Thomas uses images that seem to contradict each other (maybe an image of life, then an image of death, for instance); and that sometimes, from two contradictory images, a third images emerges; and that the process may repeat. From now on, when I read Thomas, I will be looking for signs of that process.

Okay, go read "Fern Hill." If you like you can listen to the poet read it here.

The first thing: I want to make sure you notice the tone change at the end of the poem. What shifts toward the end of the fifth stanza (and especially in the sixth)?

What is the crisis in the poem? What kind of experience might have prompted a poet to write on this subject?

What phrases do you see repeated in the poem? How does the poet vary those phrases? How do these recurring, but varied, phrases contribute to the development of the poem?

Do you think this poem would have been read "very loud" or "very soft"?

Another thing I notice in the poem is called synaesthesia. That's a good word for the AP exam. Here's the definition, from somebody's English resource page:

SYNAESTHESIA (also spelled synesthesia, from Grk. "perceiving together"): A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in an impossible way. In the resulting figure of speech, we end up talking about how a color sounds, or how a smell looks. When we say a musician hits a "blue note" while playing a sad song, we engage in synaesthesia. When we talk about a certain shade of color as a "cool green," we mix tactile or thermal imagery with visual imagery the same way. When we talk about a "heavy silence," we also use synaesthesia. Examples abound: "The scent of the rose rang like a bell through the garden." "I caressed the darkness with cool fingers." French poets, especially Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal, have proven especially eager to use synaesthesia. The term itself is a fairly late addition to rhetoric and literary terminology, first coined in 1892, though examples of this figure of speech can be found in Homer, Aeschylus, Donne, Shelley, Crashaw, and scores of other writers and poets. See examples under tropes.

Got it?

Okay, that's all I have time for tonight. :) CU l8er!