Green and dying in chains: Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill" and Kenneth Grahame's 'The Golden Age.'

But first it is essential to recall the background of "Fern Hill." The small farm that Thomas idealizes is Fernhill, where as a boy in the 1920s he spent several summers with his aunt Ann Jones and her habitually drunken husband Bill, who between them eked out a meager living from their few cows, pigs, and chickens. The living quarters were dirty and bedraggled. There was also an orchard that Thomas's American agent John Brinnin, visiting Fernhill with Thomas in 1953, described as "sprawling... rotting apples lay by the hundreds under gnarled trees... We picked red and golden apples from boughs that almost touched the ground" (237).

In a letter to Edith Sitwell in March 1946, Thomas says that he wrote "Fern Hill" the previous September "in Carmarthenshire, near the farm where it happened" (Letters 583): he was then staying at Blae Cwm Cottage, where he had been writing poems since adolescence if. not childhood (Ferris 192). How long he spent over "Fern Hill" is not known, but it must have been several months, for he showed John Brinnin "more than two hundred separate and distinct versions of the poem" (Brinnin 125). These manuscripts have since vanished. Writing out the entire poem each time he made any change, Thomas explained to Brinnin, was "his way of 'keeping the poem together,' so that its process of growth was like that of an organism" (Brinnin 125-26). On the same occasion Thomas told Brinnin that he

began almost every poem merely with some phrase he had carried about in his head. If this phrase was right, which is to say, if it were resonant or pregnant, it would suggest another phrase. In this way a poem would "accumulate." Once "given" a word (sometimes the prime movers of poems were the words of other poems or mere words of the dictionary which called out to be "set") or a phrase or a line (or whatever it is that is "given" when there is yet a poem to "prove") he could often envision it or "locate" it within a pattern of other words or phrases or lines that, not given, had yet to be discovered: so that sometimes it would be possible to surmise accurately that the "given" unit would occur near the end of the poem or near the beginning or near the middle or sometimes between.

(125-26, my emphasis)

Was there a "phrase" that Thomas "carried about in his head" around which "Fern Hill" was taking shape, and if so, what was it? Did it come from another poem or novel, or did it simply occur to Thomas? His letters at the time show that he was reading "all Lawrence's poems, some aloud" (Letters 558). Writing to Oscar Williams on July 30, 1945, he cites admiringly these lines from D. H. Lawrence's "Ballad of Another Ophelia":

O the green glimmer of apples in the orchard, Lamps in a wash of rain! O the wet walk of my brown hen through the stackyard! O tears on the window pane!

Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples Full of disappointment and of rain; Blackish [sic] they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples Of autumn tell the withered tale again. (Letters 558)