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Green and dying in chains: Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill" and Kenneth Grahame's 'The Golden Age.'
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1998 by Roger Craik
The masterful wind was up and out, shouting and chasing, the lord of the morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead leaves sprang aloft, and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept heaven seemed to thrill with sound like a great harp ... Colt-like I ran through the meadows frisking happy heels in the face of Nature laughing responsive. Above, the sky was bluest of the blue; wide pools left by the winter's floods flashed the colour back, true and brilliant ... Out into the brimming sun-bathed world I sped ... The air was wine, the moist earth-smell wine, the lark's song, the wafts from the cow-shed at the top of the field, the pant and smoke of a distant train - all were wine - or song was it? or odour, this unity they all blent into? I had no words then to describe it, that earth-effluence of which I was so conscious: nor, indeed, have I found words since. I ran sideways, shouting; I dug glad heels into the squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick; I hurled clods skywards at random, and presently I found myself singing. The words were mere nonsense - irresponsible babble; the tune was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the one thing fitting and right and perfect. (7-12)
The same joys - the blue sky, the running, singing, and the watery playing - all are enjoyed by Thomas at his "sky blue trades" (42) and "singing as the farm was home" (11). As his childhood ecstasy proves to be beyond the power of formally written language to convey, Thomas's syntax breaks down, even more than Grahame's does, into fragmented impressions:
it was lovely, the hay Fields as high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air And playing, lovely and watery. (19-21)
He is even more successful with the remarkable line (quite the best in the poem), "the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold" (16). The phrase "clear and cold" works adverbially to suggest how the foxes barked - that they should do so "coldly" is typical of Thomas's sharpening one sense against another - but also exerts itself adjectivally to suggest the child snug in bed imagining how it felt to be out on the hills at night. Here, more than anywhere else, Thomas reminds us of the romanticism (slippery a word as that is) not just of Kenneth Grahame but of his masters too, the Wordsworth of the "Immortality Ode" and the Blake of The Songs of Innocence. But Thomas is seldom thus: no sooner does he venture into the straightforward than he scampers back into his verbal cleverness, his accustomed way of writing. Accordingly Thomas's foxes are not left to bark clear and cold on the hills but do so in chiasmatic relation to the child as herdsman (Tindall 270), while the running, loveliness, and watery pleasures take place "all the sun long" (19), a variant of "all day long" that distractingly interposes Thomas's verbal trickery between the reader and the subject.
