A Study Guide for Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535823265

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Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas

1946

Introduction

Dylan Thomas has been a controversial poet since his first poems appeared in 1933. His work is not easily categorized. He has been variously described as a surrealist, a primitive, a Welsh bard, a metaphysical poet, a dadaist; the list is extensive. Perhaps the term most frequently attached to Thomas is twentieth-century Romantic.

Thomas’s poetry is usually divided into three stages. In the first period, his poems are complex and often obscure, centering on the cycle of birth and death. The poems from the second period, written primarily during the years of World War II, take on a more human and personalized dimension, and include such works as Ceremony After a Fire Raid and the elegy A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. Fern Hill was written during the last period, when Thomas produced longer narrative poems, using more understandable imagery and fluid lines. Published in Deaths and Entrances in 1946, it is one of his poems which easily fits the description, romantic; in fact, it has often been compared to William Wordsworth’s nature