Editing Fern Hill (section)

==Linguistic considerations==

The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his childhood visits to his Aunt Annie's farm:
:Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
:About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
:The night above the dingle starry,

In the middle section, the idyllic scene is expanded upon, reinforced by the lilting rhythm of the poem, the dreamlike, [[pastoral]] metaphors and allusion to [[Garden of Eden|Eden]].  
:All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
:Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air...
:With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
:Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

By the end, the poet's older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:
:Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
:Time held me green and dying
:Though I sang in my chains like the sea.<ref>[http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/themes/books/dylan_thomas.shtml Dylan Thomas] on BBC Wales Arts page</ref>

The poem uses [[Internal rhyme|internal]] [[half rhyme]] and [[full rhyme]] as well as [[end rhyme]]. Thomas was very conscious of the effect of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of [[Gerard Manley Hopkins]]. He always denied having conscious knowledge of [[Welsh language|Welsh]], but "his lines chime with internal consonantal correspondence, or ''[[cynghanedd]]'', a prescribed feature of Welsh versification".<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Gross |first1=Harvey Seymour |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kuUKoVypTcIC&q=Fern+Hill&pg=PA255 |title=Sound and Form in Modern Poetry |last2=McDowell |first2=Robert |date=1996 |publisher=University of Michigan Press |isbn=978-0-472-06517-2 |pages=255 |language=en}}</ref>