Consider Fern Hill as a poem on Childhood

Fern Hill was completed in 1945. This is a poem in which Thomas recreates his childhood experiences. For Thomas, childhood was a state of innocence and grace. Fern Hill is a nostalgic and melancholic. Thomas is showing us his childhood, when everything was fresh and new, everything was green, golden and bright.  He represents it to us a Welsh rural setting of green, wagons, apples, daisies, barley, light, a time and place in which he felt princely and lordly

Using outwardly native language and simple descriptions, Thomas creates an idyllic  sketch of a dairy farm in which his aunt Ann and uncle Jim had lived when he was a child. In this lyrical poem about childhood, he said he was "young and easy", Thomas uses words and phrases which recreate a child's interpretation of the world.

Describing how as he "rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away", he recreates a typical childish fantasy that the world disappears when it is no longer visible. The sense of youthful freedom is reinforced by the form of the poem.

Absent from Fern Hill is the adult narrator, who views the past with a mixture of nostalgia and cynicism. Thomas emphasises through repetition that this pastoral world is green and golden. The ringing of the church bells combine to make a music expressing a world that is peaceful, joyous and holy. The Peaches, which is "so poor and grand and dirty". Childhood is recreated as a sensuous experience which is not relegated to memory like the "long dead child" from Thomas' first-person Poem In October.

For the first four stanzas nothing bad is allowed to intrude on Thomas' youthful paradise: even Eve is referred to indirectly in her pre-Fall innocent state as a 'maiden'. But in the final stanzas the mood changes and we are reminded about the passage of time which holds him "green and dying". He reintroduces familiar themes of mortality, religion and the endless progression of time.

Thomas tells us that each morning was like the first morning of Creation. He would return to waking consciousness and find the farm, gone during the night, come back “like a wanderer white with dew”, the cock that cries the morning on his shoulder. Not at all a prosaic statement like, “I woke on the farm and heard the rooster on the fence crowing.” Again Thomas presents us with images of light and freshness: “It was all shining,/It was adam and maiden”. The sun never aged, but was continually born afresh: “The sun grew round that very day”.

Thomas speaks here of “The sun born over and over,” which seems in direct contradiction to his earlier mention of “the sun that is young once only.” the solution is that by “born over and over” he is referring to the actual individual days of his childhood while bye “the sun that is young once only” he is referring to his childhood as an entire period. The sun of childhood is “young once only.” and then childhood with its bright, golden light is gone forever.

Thomas always returns to the larger philosophical issues of life. The tone and vocabulary of Fern Hill are deceptively (বিভ্রান্তিকর) native and simple, and serious themes linger in the background throughout. The poem has a visionary quality. This idea, the loss of innocence is repeated in the final stanza. Fern Hill is narration's childhood of a man as he faces his death, portrays the universal truth of human mortality and death in the natural life cycle