Fern Hill

 November 23, 2025

Strange brownish dark over the world. Georgian music on You Tube, sad and beautiful.

Stood in for J as Scrooge at the AVLGMC rehearsal Saturday. The script, which I feared, is at the worst innocuous and at the best charming. Did not, could not stay for the full rehearsal. Enough of that is enough. Ate a pastry and made my excuses. ASC concert Saturday night was lovely, I thought, not too big, none of the music too familiar. C sang Stravinsky’s “In Memory of Dylan Thomas” to perfection, which is not easy to do, given it’s made of tone rows and there are no reference points, no way one note helps you onto the next. Twelve-tone music is an unexpectedly good vehicle for poetry, as you concentrate on the words, having no melody by which to be seduced. In this it makes an odd alliance with Baroque opera, which is the last time text was actually at the fore. I think my pre-show Dylan Thomas lecture went well. It sounded right in my ears– but how would one tell, as there was no time after to chit-chat? The audience was quite elderly. I felt a youth again. However ancient, only one was visibly asleep.

***

David Brendan Hopes

Facing Dylan Thomas: For The Asheville Symphony Chorus Concert, Nov 22, 2025

Read Text of Over Sir John's Hill

Here the young poet Dylan Thomas– he was always young– declares the duty he takes on as a creator, a comprehensive elegy for the dead, which requires an extended and inspired celebration of the living. In the program tonight we will hear Stravinsky’s setting of Thomas most famous death poem, the villanelle Do Not Go Gentle into That Good night. Remember that you do not mourn what you have not praised, so if you say that Thomas’s poems are elegies for what is passed you would be right, and if you say they are celebrations for what is, you would be right. This is one of the great vocation poems, wherein the poet declares the great theme of his ministry. In your leisure time, please compare it with other great Vocation poems, such as Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” By some grace I have been given to see this miraculous thing. If the powers permit, I will deliver this miracle to the entire world. 

Were you tuned into the world of high culture in the early 1950's, you’d have witnessed an unexpected phenomenon: a scruffy poet reading to mass audiences, not quite in stadiums, but in venues larger than most fine artists could imagine, getting reviews, making headlines, fawned over by nearly hysterical fans..That these fans were largely middle aged academics renders the events all the more remarkable. 

Dylan Thomas made piles of money on his American tours– the tour organizers made more– returned home with almost none of it, and so had to return three times, sicker and more desperate each time, trying for financial success somewhere near the magnitude of the artistic one. Not all the echoes of these amazing events have died down. On my first day of graduate school I walked into the English Department office at Johns Hopkins, and asked why there was a trash can bolted to the wall. “That,” the secretary explained to me, “is the trash can into which Dylan Thomas vomited when he read on campus.” Even a secular age has its holy relics. 

A surprising percentage of the places relevant to Thomas’ childhood and youth are gone. His home town, Swansea, was an industrial port blasted to pieces during the Blitz. He was in London then, writing some of time’s greatest elegies for the dead in war, including “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a child in London,” which ends with the lines like the tolling of a golden bell: 

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

Thomas’s wife Caitlin tagged along for the third American tour to keep him from too many adulterous assignations. He and she carried on a contest wherein each strove to be the sloppiest and rudest drunk. To honor her memory, one must acknowledge that Caitlin often won. Thomas died before the third tour was finished, notoriously neglected in a New York hospital emergency room where everybody thought he was just some drunk rolled in off the street. At least that was the story that honored everyone’s idea of how a poet should end in a world that does not love poets, or even understand fully what one is. It almost doesn’t matter anymore what the real story was. 

But for a few years, Dylan Thomas was a rock star. Three American tours organized by Canadian/American critic John Malcolm Brinnin brought not only his art but his bad behavior to the forefront of cultural consciousness. He was a Brit–one should say more specifically a Welshman– and in the UK he had cobbled together a life of irregular publications and commissions from the BBC, enough to keep his family fed, after a fashion. No one since Byron has gotten rich from being a poet, and Thomas’s extravagant appetites and absent organizational skills made his lot rougher than many. He was capable of holding a job, and was for a while an important contributor to the BBC’s cultural programming, retreating from time to time to his study at riverside near Swansea, his hometown, to write his poems. 

His days of yeomanly striving amid the deprivations of war-shattered Brittan tend to be forgotten, for in America, he was gold. He could be counted on to drink too much at the party, to fall on the floor and try to look up the hostess’s dress, to accept the company of culture vampires who wanted to brag that they had slept with the most famous poet in the world. Brinnin cashed in twice, not only organizing the tours, but writing a book afterward, Dylan Thomas in America, wherein the worst moments of the situation he himself created were cataloged. He was the most splendid and unalloyed example imaginable of the dissolute poet, helpless in every daily pursuit, but god-like when his mouth opened and the thunder rolled out. A Minnesota folk singer by the name of Bob Zimmerman wold rename himself after him. 

Dylan Thomas grew up in Wales in a situation that can be described as half suburban, half rural. The Welsh are proud of their language, and some biographers claim Welsh was spoken in the Thomas household, though Dylan himself never claimed to use it or understand it. But there’s something in the culture that honors the male voice– think of the famous Welsh male choirs, and of Thomas’ younger contemporary, Richard Burton. Voice would become the center of the Dylan Thomas mystique, and for every reader who appreciated his words on the page, there would be 20 seduced by his voice. So thorough was that seduction that some critics claimed Thomas had not much to say at all, only an unmatched way of saying it. They were wrong. 

When he was reading his own poems, very few people had any idea what he was talking about. Nor were they inclined to worry about that, for his famous voice, resonant, god-like, incantatory, encouraged admiration more than comprehension. It was like a Latin Mass or listening to the chanting of Tibetan monks on the Internet. 

But, now that the time of notoriety is passed– many of my colleagues in the Symphony Chorus murmured “Who’s Dylan Thomas?” when the music was handed out– the time is ripe for evaluation, for a second hearing aside from the enthusiasm of fame. This calmer audition reveals a poet of lasting greatness, and one who is easier to comprehend than one supposes. Here are a few pointers for getting at the meaning of a Dylan Thomas poem, among the greatest of which is tonight’s “Fern Hill.” 

“Fern Hill,” by the way, is a farm in Wales owned by his Aunt Ann Jones, where Thomas spent a number of years in the 1920's. When Thomas lived there it possessed a large apple orchard, which accounts for some of the imagery in the poem. One may think of it as a remenbered Eden.

Speaking about Dylan Thomas to an audience with a particular interest in music is advantageous, because one way to grasp his intention is to think of him in musical terms. The first tip to full comprehension is to read “Fern Hill,” or any other Thomas poem, aloud. This is a secret to conquering all poems in the Western tradition. As a poet myself I know that a poem is written for the ear, and best communicates to the ear. Think of that old hymn “Humbly I Adore Thee,” which says “taste and touch and vision to discern thee fail. Faith that comes through hearing pierces through the veil.”

The normal expectation for a poem in English is that it will hover in the neighborhood of iambic pentameter. Do NOT go GENtle into THAT goodNIGHT. The FORCE that THROUGH the GREEN fuse DRIVES the Flower, but Fern Hill whacks us with a intake-of-breath anapest (now as I) followed by an alternation –or perhaps an experimental uncertainty–of meters, before crashing into a cluster of thunderous trochees.

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

     The night above the dingle starry,

          Time let me hail and climb

I promise this will be the one and only mention of prosody, and I do so only to suggest that Thomas alters his meter, his time signatures, exactly the way a composer does, for variety and strangeness and lyricism far afield from the drumbeat of certainty. Fern Hill never rests very long in iambic pentameter. It is never in C major and 4/4 time. Not Mendelssohn but Bartok. Actually, when I think of the closest parallel in music to Thomas’s achievement in “Fern Hill” I arrive at Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Insofar as either of them is “about” anything, they are about the same thing. 

Now that we’ve broached the subject of “meaning,” what is it? First of all, believe that it takes no special apparatus to get at the message of even a poet as idiosyncratic as Thomas. It’s all there on the page. There is no such thing “hidden” meaning in poetry. The “hidden meaning” of a poem is like that part of the iceberg that is underwater and therefore invisible, but the ice above will tell you almost all you need to know about the ice below. 

Poetry–next to music, I suppose–is the most compact and efficient way of delivering emotional information. If poems seem difficult, it is because they have skipped from A to W, trusting you to fill in the spaces in between, or to recognize that the spaces in between are interesting to a scholar but irrelevant to the reader. When a poem says “My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June,” you probably can EXPLAIN what that means, but the explanation takes many times longer than the original image, and is not as much fun. 

When people refer to the “meaning” of a poem, they often mean a paraphrase, a parallel construction usually presented with the phrase, “Well, what he meant to say was–” attached to the front. Do remember that the poems we cherish present not meaning but experience. 

When Yeats writes “Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

What he really means is “Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

It is not about paraphrase. It is about experience. If the experience could have been related any other way, it would have been.

The paraphrase of “Fern Hill” is “Wasn’t it lovely being young? “ We recognize that sentence is continents away from the experience of the poem. 

Imagine that you’re hiking. You stop on a hilltop and look around. Tell me the meaning of what you see. It sounds stupid in that context, but it’s almost as stupid when applied to poetry, at least poetry on the level of Dylan Thomas. You see birds and clouds, but unless the seeing of birds and clouds is illuminated by some radiant image, the real experience fails to convey. I worked through college as a Parks Naturalist, so I see an additional level of specificity– mountain ash and pileated woodpecker and basidiomycetes. Any better? Some, maybe, but still the quality of the experience escapes unrevealed. Poetry’s power is to present without explanation, to enlighten without doctrine. When somebody says, “Gee, didn’t we have good times as kids,” you’re invited to fill in the blanks with your own experience. When Thomas writes, 

Time let me play and be

     Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

          And the sabbath rang slowly

     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

You’re presented with a vision that guides, enlarges, and transforms your own. You saw it for yourself without realizing its richness, its sadness, its eternity. If you never saw such a thing for yourself, it is a free gift, a donation of a corner of the world that otherwise would have been dark to you. 

 Imagine for a moment that you are in Plato’s cave, peering into the dark at what you suppose is reality. Artists helps you to understand and reconcile with what you see. The greatest artists take you by the shoulders, turn you around and march you toward the true light. 

Thomas’ poetry has its own music, which makes it less easy than certain others for a composer to set to music.  Two mighty strains must reconcile. Corigliano and Thomas must find a way to co-exists, to speak at the same time and still be understood. Though TS Eliot was the poet of his time the least like Thomas in any way, they both came to a point where they believed poetry must somehow emulate, or at least suggest, the movement of music. We see this in Eliot’s Four Quartets, which even has a musical title. We see this in the poems which I believe are Dylan Thomas’s greatest– Fern Hill, Over Sir John’s Hill, In the White Giant’s Thigh, In Country Sleep, whose sprawling, inclusive, impassioned, un-paraphrasable energy comes as close as words can to the symphonic. Let me again evoke Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, I wish I could get Disney’s nymphs and satyrs out of my head, as I wish I could get out the image of the waste can on the office wall. Let me substitute an image of Beethoven and Thomas in Paradise, Thomas intoning into Beethoven’s deaf ears, and Beethoven understanding every word

In a few minutes we’ll will hear Corigliano’s music dancing with Dylan Thomas’s. I think you might want to hear Thomas in its purity beforehand, so you can tell what has happened and why

Read Text of “Fern Hill.”