Topic > The Importance of Time at Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

"Now I was young and at ease under the apple trees." (1). In the poem Fern Hill, the poet tries to express the feelings he felt as a child, lying happily under the trees on a starry night. And from the way he talks, it seems like he does it on more than one occasion. Thomas uses colors to illustrate moments in time and to emphasize certain lines to give them more meaning. There is also a strong sense of time shown in many parts of the poem, time that belongs to him both as a child and as an adult. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The poet uses the presence of time as a connection to his childhood in many ways, such as when he says, “Time let me play.” and be." (13). Twice in this poem the phrase "Time leaves me" appears, and each time the poet gives a different thing that time has allowed him to do, "hail and climb" (4) and " play and be." (13). Although one of the main themes of this poem is youth and childhood, much is shown about time passing and aging, as illustrated when Thomas writes in the second stanza: "In the sun that he is only young once" (12). . This sentence is the first time we see that youth is never lasting and that aging is inevitable. Another way we are told about the inevitability of aging is the presence of past tense verbs such as were and was, which Thomas has inserted throughout the poem. Some examples of his past tense verb collocations are: "[...] singing like the farm was home", (11) which is something that indicates that the farm is no longer home to him, and at the end of the second stanza Thomas writes, “And green and gold I was hunter and shepherd” (15). Color is used in this poem to express different emotions and stages of a person's life. This symbolism is shown when the poet says, “And how green and carefree I was” (10). When the poet uses the color green, he refers to his childhood. However, at the end of the poem, Thomas uses color in a completely different way. He writes, “Time has kept me green and dying” (53), and in this case Thomas uses it as a way to tell us how he feels now, thinking back to his childhood. The poet also uses gold, or as Thomas says, gilded, when he does so he is referring to the height of his youth; which Thomas dramatizes when he writes “Golden in the heyday of his eyes” (5), meaning that at that point the poet was as happy as he could be at that moment. In the last verse Thomas writes: "[...] in the white days of the lamb" (46). The meaning of "the lamb" is that it is something pure and innocent, which is also what the color white represents. Time is one of the most important themes in this poem, because the poem talks about time passing and days passing. At the end of the poem, the way time is presented has changed drastically, the poet no longer speaks as if life were light or happy, but speaks as if time is now the enemy, "[...] time would require me” (46), “Until the swallow crowded in the attic in the shadow of my hand.” (47) This is a darker tone for the poem, considering that before hearing things like “And the sun grew around that same day" (32), and towards the end, in the last stanza, the poet recites: "In the moon that always rises" (48). The poet went from talking about how the sun would rise day after day, to talking about the moon that stays high in the sky. Keep in mind: this is just an example. Get a custom paper now from our expert writers. After reading this poem, one of the first questions that came up was: who won was the poet? Who spoke of his glorious?