17 pages • 34 minutes read
Dylan ThomasFern Hill
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Music and Song
The motif of song and singing pervades the poem. The boy is “singing as the farm was home” (Line 11), which can be both literally and figuratively understood; no doubt at times he was actually singing, but the word also refers to his exultation and general delight. Even the farm animals respond in song to his herding, which is described in terms of a musical instrument: “[T]he calves / Sang to my horn” (Line 16). The sound of “the pebbles of the holy streams” is another kind of music, and the poet hears in it “the sabbath” that “rang slowly” (Line 17).
Several lines later another figurative expression appears, as something musical emerges from an unlikely source: “the tunes from the chimneys” (Line 20). Time also has its music, which the speaker acknowledges even as he describes its role in bringing his childhood to an end. He refers to time as allowing “In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs” (Line 43). Time may rob him of the joys of his precious childhood—his “morning songs”—but it may still be part of a larger harmony of life, the melody of which sweeps on (“tuneful turning”), even if childhood does not. Finally, in the poem’s last line, the speaker presents himself as singing throughout his childhood, oblivious as he was to the onward march of time: “I sang in my chains like the sea” (Line 54). The sea sings, too.
Nescience
The speaker's nescience, or unawareness, of the ephemeral nature of childhood and its delights is a recurring motif. Of course, as a child he could not be expected to know such things, but the speaker, looking back, cannot help but bring attention to this fact. It is implied in the very first line, in the phrase, “As I was young and easy” in which “as” can be read as “because” and “easy” as, perhaps, uncomplicated, unburdened by the difficulties of life. Thus, because of the child’s unawareness, time can hoodwink or indulge him (“Time let me play,” Line 13), and even though the repeated images of sun and moon suggest the steady passage of days, the child is oblivious to what that passage will soon mean. “And as I was green and carefree” (Line 10) in Stanza 2 repeats the same construction, and in the following line the phrase “young once only” (Line 11) is applied not to the boy, for whom such a thought would be impossible, but (obscurely) to the sun. The phrase likely derives from the idiom “you’re only young once,” which tells people to enjoy themselves while they can.
In Stanza 5, in spite of the fact that the sun is “born over and over” (that is, many days pass), the boy ran his “heedless ways” (Line 40), and in the next line he states, “Nothing I cared” (Line 41)—a phrase exactly repeated just four lines later at the beginning of Stanza 6. The phrase is predicated on the speaker's youthful innocence, his lack of knowing. He is unaware that there is plenty about which to care, but only the dawning of adult consciousness will tell him so. The mood of the poem suggests that the end of those blissful, unaware “carefree” (Line 10) days is a high price to pay for obtaining such mature knowledge.
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By Dylan Thomas
