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

It is entirely in Grahame's line to fashion an appropriately morning song from the first two lines of Robert Burns's "Up in the Morning Early" ("Up in the morning's no for me, / Up in the morning early") and from the "Old Macdonald Had a Farm" type of song with animal noises. In "Fern Hill" Grahame's farmyard ditty appears in a very different guise:

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs Before the children green and golden Follow him out of grace. (42-45)

Thomas has taken Grahame's jaunty command "Now my lads, come with me" and placed it, not in any "morning song" of his own, but, by implication, in the mouth of Time after he has allowed "so few and such morning songs" and no more. Consequently Thomas's "children" (a less robust word than "lads") hear Time calling them ("Now ... come with me") and accordingly "follow," seemingly with free will but in fact because they have to.

Thomas's attitude toward The Golden Age and its style raises more far-reaching issues than that of direct influence. Kenneth Grahame, writing with wit, satire, and whimsy (all of which qualities Thomas is innocent), inhabits "divided and distinguished worlds of mature awareness and innocent vision" (Green 177), a mode of writing that he made distinctive in the 1890s but that, again, harks back to Wordsworth and the Blake of the Songs of Innocence. With Grahame the reader can feel and think what many children at some time feel and think as Grahame shifts, without strain, from the role of grown-up commentator to that of childish narrator. Although the prologue to The Golden Age is nostalgic, it is neither sad nor mawkishly despairing: Grahame's five orphans are confidently undeceived in their view of the world, and on most occasions are more acute than the Olympians whom they encounter. Their childhoods gradually vanish and they grow up.

This manner of writing requires both self-confidence and daring: one risks being dismissed as childish oneself, naive, or just daft. (To their credit, most contemporary reviewers of The Golden Age recognized Grahame's sophistication even if it did not happen to be to their taste.) Unlike Grahame, Dylan Thomas never quite dared to take the risk even though he wanted to: this, above all, is what his borrowings from The Golden Age reveal. From The Golden Age, as I have tried to demonstrate, Thomas took the truly childish things, such as enjoyment of buttercups, playing on wagons, farmyard ditties - the things that are enjoyed simply as children enjoy them - and then prized them from their setting and garbed them with metaphor and allegory. To write this way is to write as an adult poet remembers rather than as a child thinks - "Fern Hill" has none of The Golden Age's freshness - but the very pains that Thomas takes to disguise the literal serve to underline the power of its effect on him. He was strongly drawn toward childhood and wanted to write about it: his own childhood is a major theme in Deaths and Entrances, the book to which "Fern Hill" was a late addition. But whereas in his earlier books Thomas had created his own self-referential yet refreshingly unembarrassed swagger of language to convey the urgency of sex, for childhood he was faced by the need for an altogether simpler, more direct, register. It is this that Grahame provides. Here, free of adults for a day, his child narrator cuts loose with untrammeled zest: