Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas, his biographers agree, enjoyed a happy childhood. From when he was very young until he was 11 years old, he spent his summer holidays at Fern Hill where his uncle and aunt, Jack and Ann Jones, were tenants. Ann, it seems, did most of the work to maintain the farm, which was located near the village of Llangynog in the county of Carmarthenshire, in southwest Wales. The Jones’s kept pigs, cows, and chicken and made much of their modest living from selling butter. By the mid-1920s their tenancy had ended, however, and they moved on; so, when Thomas wrote “Fern Hill,” he was recalling memories from more than 20 years’ earlier.

Thomas was a careful craftsman, and accumulated 200 worksheets for this poem, as his biographer Paul Ferris notes. As far as the finished product is concerned, Thomas told Marguerite Caetani—his wealthy American patron—he was quite pleased with it; it was among half a dozen of his poems that “came nearer to what I had in heart and mind and muscle when first I wished to write them” (Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas, edited by Constantine Fitzgibbon, 1966, p. 338). He did however, confide to John Malcolm Brinnin, an American poet who arranged Thomas’s reading tours of the United States in the early 1950s, that he disliked the line “I ran my heedless ways” (Line 40).