Compare and Contrast the poem “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas with the poem “The Echoing Green” by William Blake.

Subject and Literal Themes

In Fern Hill as he knowledge it, his correlative is as innocent as he, if that be the ranch or the princess, who is “maiden” other than “Eve” because (as Genesis 3:20 states) the last cited title entails “giver of life” or “mother of all the living.” Saint Augustine of Hippo said that annals started only after the Original Sin, so the child's world appears timeless, a new world recently conceived at each dawn.

As in numerous Renaissance verses (William Shakespeare's Sonnets 18, 55, 65, and 116, for example), time is the foe, but for the Renaissance book reader, Father Time was Cronos (Saturn), who in Greek myth consumed all of his own children. In Thomas's verse, time is a for the time being benevolent despot, “allowing” and “permitting” the child a time of flawless happiness before he forfeitures his own progeny to the claims of his cannibalistic nature.

Underlying Philosophy

 The speaking voice pertains to a male mature individual recalling his childhood and its inevitable end. “Fern Hill” re-creates and communicates the know-how of a child who (for the first part of the poem) has not yet developed into chronicled perception and who accordingly lives in an eternal present in the Garden of Eden (Thomas 1)

The boy's life is composed of repetitions of the circuits of environment, so to him there appears to be no route of time; from his mature individual vantage issue, although, he recognizes that time was toying with him until, inevitably, it exiled him from the privileged land of childhood.

In a casual, conversational pitch, the verse starts by introducing the innocent young man in the context of a “middle landscape” composed of environment, the cultivation of tame plants and animals, and the art of recital (the “lilting house”) in a little Welsh valley with wooded edges (a “dingle”). Because he still lives in the innocent world of the fairy tale (“once underneath a time”), he has the power of a lord to command the trees and departs, to have them manage his will. This time of life, as the bard idealizes it, is a windfall—an undeserved and unforeseen boon, like a ripe apple crop that has blown off a tree on a stranger's house and that the hungry passerby has a right to take and eat. (Thomas 1)

The second stanza strengthens the image of the first with distinct images. The young man lives in happy unison with the tame calves and the untamed foxes; time passes musically, like the eternal Sabbath, as the instrument the young man performances consorts in a single hymn with the voices of the singing animals.

Setting

At the beginning of the last stanza, Thomas values a very personal and obscure symbol: The lamblike child ascends to the loft of the barn at moonrise and dozes to aroused no longer innocent, no longer childlike, alienated from the ranch and from ...