Sea Song

I was surprised to hear lines from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” come back to me as I watched my children and grandchildren play in the pastures and on the beaches of Cornwall.

by Steve Charles

As I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
        Time let me play and be
        Golden in the mercy of his means . . .

from “Fern Hill”, by Dylan Thomas

The last time I was in the United Kingdom, before our most recent visit last August, I was 21 and studying the poems of Dylan Thomas for my Independent Study at Trinity College in Carmarthen, Wales.

“Fern Hill” was the poem that first hooked me on Thomas and the poetry of those influenced by my Welsh ancestors (Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert among those poets) for whom the sound of the words was nearly as important as their meaning. Try reading “Fern Hill”, or Hopkins’ “The Windhover”, out loud, for a sample. They’re exhilarating! I knew my family came from a place that looked at reality just a bit differently than the rest of the world, and I was glad for that. I wanted to understand that as much as Thomas’s poetry.

Back in 1977 I passed Fern Hill Farm on the car ride to the village of Llansteffen, where I spent two weeks with a Welsh family. There were power lines right down the middle of the place where time had once let the young Dylan Thomas “play and be/golden in the mercy of his means.” Later I met an old friend of Thomas’s who said that although most people thought it was booze that killed him, it was really leaving his home and so many people he knew and cared about him for who he was, not what they could get from him. And I studied with a poet who saw those power lines through Fern Hill Farm as a metaphor for our culture’s addiction to “progress” and forgetting our past.

As I studied the trajectory of some of Thomas’s most beautiful poems 46 years ago, I recognized even then the deep melancholy and wishful thinking behind his writing, this sense that joy and wonder shattered when tossed up against the harsh certainties of the “real” world. Thomas himself, after penning this tribute to the wonders of childhood, said that “the only worse thing than a bad childhood was a childhood that was too good,” and his adulthood ended in a failed marriage, alcoholism, and eventual death from complications of that illness.

And I wrote about that for my IS 40 years ago, got a good grade, and have since looked elsewhere for hope and beauty.

So I was surprised to hear lines from that poem come back to me last month as I watched my children and grandchildren play in the pastures and on the beaches of Cornwall, only a hundred miles or so from Fern Hill Farm and Wales. Thomas captures so well the feeling of kairos, that time beyond time where my five-year-old grandson Olly lives whenever he encounters the woods, a beach, a tide pool, a pasture, a stream, or practically any wild place. It’s still there for his big brother Myca too, now 15 and on the edge of adulthood.

“Fern Hill” ends with the most beautiful and haunting lines I’ve ever read:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
         Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Again, read it out loud—it sounds so lovely, the cadence so perfect, that in my first reading I missed the poignancy: that Thomas was remembering a world, a state, to which he could no longer return. And at the end of that first visit to Wales in 1977, I believed that was true for me, too.

But that changed all these years later as I watched my grandson Olly playing on Lantivet Beach as hours passed like minutes and the shifting light through the swirling clouds seemed to change the landscape by the second. I’ve come to realize that, whatever the end of our lives might bring, that song from the mouths of our children and grandchildren is a beauty never ending, at least as we mere mortals can comprehend. So much more profound than I could ever have imagined when I was their age. Maybe there’s a seed in that that lasts forever. If there is a god or any force that created the universe, surely his or her or their love is greater than my mortal and flawed love that wants forever for these children and anyone else on the beach. And, if so, we’re all going to be okay, one way or the other.

But if not, the love I felt watching them play there, held “green and dying”, is enough. Knowing that long after I am gone they will sing that sea song, as will their children, as will anyone who hears that music.

And, yes, Olly will grow up and the joy and wonder of childhood may shatter against the harsh realities of heartbreak and having to make a living in a world that seems to grow harder by the day. But if he’s lucky, like me, he’ll live long enough to see it again in the eyes of a child, maybe even in his own grandchild, and realize that it never left, has always been there waiting for his return, as it was for mine.

And as he sings that song again, green and dying, he just might find me there, too.