Blake Fletcher
AP English
November 13, 2011
Fern Hill
The poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas seems to be about the difference between being a wreck less child and an adult with responsibilities. The poem opens to a worry free child whose only concern seems to be having fun. The colors and sense of time seem to play a large role in this as well and help support the theme of aging. The end of the poem reveals the dark truth about having responsibilities.
The first line of the poem is “Now I was young and easy under the apple boughs” this puts the image of a kid hanging out in the shade casted from an apple tree. The word easy doesn’t refer to his age it refers to that he was relaxed. This means that he was actually young and relaxing under an apple tree. Thus showing that the speaker in this stanza at least is a young boy or possibly an old man remembering his childhood.
The colors that describe the speaker in this poem mean a lot. For example in the second stanza “Golden in the mercy of his means” The color gold symbolizes purity and innocence. While in the final stanza “Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days” white is a symbol for death or winter which is also a time where everything seems to die apposed to spring where everything is “green” and growing.
In the beginning of this poem it shows a young boy who spends his days playing and relaxing. Time seems to be his friend and the days seem to last forever. In the end the grown man sees the days as short possibly not long enough to get all his work done. He constantly sees the moon and maybe dreads the day because all he does is work.
The saying “you can’t outrun your childhood” applies directly to this poem. Remembering how it seemed like days lasted years and you could just play and play and never run out of time when you where playing is fantastic. Now as an older person the speaker realizes how short the day actually is and is overwhelmed with the tasks at hand. He doesn’t seem to think he has the time to get all of the work done and it haunts him.
Blake this is probably your best explication to date. But, you still need to think about set: hook, thesis statement (what is the theme here) and order of development (you're going to prove your thesis by looking at what exactly). Also, these need to be longer and you need to look closer at literary devices. This poem makes meaning through what devices? Actually state them and then go through examples of the devices with explication of how they make meaning and relate back to the theme.
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