Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: The Poets’s Passion for Auden’s Greatness

S Bharadwaj

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.6p.174

Abstract

The poem “Fern Hill” is interpreted as autobiographical and reminiscent of Dylan Thomas’s boyhood holidays. A reading of the figurative language of the poem, the process of playing with its tropes can be the basis of right interpretation independent of the poet’s life or an historical context. As the poem seeks to be persuasive and objective, it relies more on rhetorics suggesting the sufferings of the fallen poets of the thirties and the war poet of the forties owing to their wild love of the transcendental art of W.H.Auden’s Poems (1930) considered as touchstone of great poetry and a hope for self-advancement in life. However, it is the paradoxical poems of Thomas and his vicarious poetical character that have rehabilitated and revamped the depressed poets. “Fern Hill” reaffirms and reassures the continuation of the same sceptic poetic tradition and culture which Thomas has cherished in all the preceeding and the succeeding poems. What this paper, keeping the contemporary poets’s passion for Auden’s greatness and glory, their dreams and destinations as focal point, strives to convey is the liberating power of Thomas’s moral disinterestedness, his vicarious comic vision and his poetic process of life-in-death contrasted with the amoral aesthetic disinterestedness of Auden, his historic tradition and his poetic process of death-in-life.

Highlights

The fact that the poem “Fern Hill” is written in an adopted style, perfect, conditions the reader’s response; its paradoxical structure and its ambiguous language further hinder right appreciation
As the poem seeks to be persuasive and objective, it relies more on rhetorics suggesting the sufferings of the fallen poets of the thirties and the war poet of the forties owing to their wild love of the transcendental art of W.H.Auden’s Poems (1930) considered as touchstone of great poetry and a hope for self-advancement in life
What this paper, keeping the contemporary poets’s passion for Auden’s greatness and glory, their dreams and destinations as focal point, strives to convey is the liberating power of Thomas’s moral disinterestedness, his vicarious comic vision and his poetic process of life-in-death contrasted with the amoral aesthetic disinterestedness of Auden, his historic tradition and his poetic process of death-in-life

Summary

Introduction

The fact that the poem “Fern Hill” is written in an adopted style, perfect, conditions the reader’s response; its paradoxical structure and its ambiguous language further hinder right appreciation. What strikes the reader most is the stylistic advance achieved in a remarkably short period, the technical excellence, the magnificent rhetorical diction and versification that is evident in the poem Throughout his poetic career Thomas continues his search for the proper vehicle, and in the later poem Deaths and Entrances this search is intimately connected with his appraisal of the poetry of the past. His most favourite poem, A.E. Houseman’s Last Poems, seems to achieve the necessary fusion of largeness and depth, but Thomas still feels an inward compulsion to attempt the Audenesque manner his 18 Poems is an indirect repudiation of W.H.Auden’s elegant art. As Thomas suggests, he wants at least to try to attain the artistic stature of Auden even if his poetry is to follow a different direction: On almost the incendiary eve

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