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

As William York Tindall points out, these lines probably suggested to Thomas the image of "windfall light" for "Fern Hill" (269), but of course Thomas had read the whole poem, and further on he would have come across Ophelia's painful recollections:

Once I had a lover bright like running water, Once his face was open like the sky, Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter On the buttercups, and the buttercups was I. (Lawrence 17-20)

Here is the narrator of Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age relishing a hot summer's afternoon with his companions:

We three younger ones were stretched at length in the orchard. The sun was hot, the season merry June, and never (I thought) had there been such wealth and riot of buttercups throughout the lush grass. Green-and-gold was the dominant key that day. Instead of active "pretence" with its shouts and its perspiration, how much better - I held - to lie at ease and pretend to one's self, in green and golden fancies, slipping the husk and passing, a careless lounger, through a sleepy imaginary world all gold and green! (24)

Thomas may have been struck at once by the similarity between Lawrence's Ophelia seeing herself as a buttercup and Grahame's evocation of a green and golden world of grass and buttercups. To Thomas, who could so easily, in Matthew Arnold's line from "Dover Beach," "Find ... in the sound a thought" (19) and to whose ear from childhood words were "the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain" (Thomas, "Poetic Manifesto" 45), the phrase "green and golden" may have been as enchanting as it was to its originator, and it could surely have become the central phrase of "Fern Hill" even if Grahame had written it just once, and even if Thomas had not been reading Lawrence. But what is crucial is that Grahame himself explores the possibilities of green and gold in the very way that Brinnin reports Thomas as preferring while writing his own poems. From "green-and-gold" (the hyphens suggesting that while the colors are distinct they are also inseparable, and the order indicating that green predominates) Grahame is moved to "green and golden fancies" (the green of the lush grass still taking precedence) and only later, only once the husk has been slipped and the world is imaginary rather than real, can Grahame lead with "gold" ("a sleepy imaginary world all gold and green"). In this way Grahame not only provides the central phrase of "Fern Hill" but he also, in effect, sets Thomas's famous poem in motion: "Fern Hill" is, as it were, "green and golden fancies."(1)

Although Grahame's "green and golden" is the most radical influence of The Golden Age on "Fern Hill," there are 'many others. Of course, the children "stretched out at length in the orchard" and lying "at ease" merge into the solitary narrator of "Fern Hill," "young and easy under the apple boughs" (1). Those apple boughs are mentioned by name a page later in The Golden Age, and Ernest H. Shepard pictures them sprawling as close to the ground as the ones that Thomas remembered and Brinnin describes at the real Fernhill (26, 3). But I think it likely that Thomas was even more impressed by The Golden Age's enchanting cover illustration. Here in silhouette a boy and a gift, he playing either a pipe or a recorder and she looking at a buttercup that she has plucked, sit beneath a spreading apple tree. Even though Shepard's tree is a young one with slender branches rather than gnarled boughs, it, too, probably bore on the first verse of "Fern Hill." Certainly the scene's Edenic possibilities could not have escaped Thomas, who saw a child Adam and a child Eve each on either side of the tree (as Adam and Eve are often depicted in painting) from which the apples hang prominent and unpicked. These suggestions of prelapsarian bliss led him later to describe as "Adam and maiden" (30) the farm's phenomenal return "all / Shining" (29-30) each morning when the speaker awakes.