"Fen Hill" was first published in 1946 in the volume of poems entitled Death and Entrances. It is a poem about childhood pleasures and pains of losing childhood. It has a distinctively autobiographical tone. Fern Hill was the name of Dylan Thomas' aunt's farm where the boy Thomas passed many happy summer vacations, wandering about the little paradise like a lord of the place. In this poem his youthful fantasies have been recreated. It has six stanzas. In the first stanza all the themes of the poem are introduced: the little boy living on the firm, playing in the sun and dreaming at night under the stars and discuss about critical appreciation of Fern Hill. Though he feels lordly, he is subject to change in the natural course of Time. In the second stanza the movement of the poem begins like the first babblings of a stream. The little boy himself is seen playing about the happy yard. In the third ,the noon of his childhood day is passed and play gives place to sleep and dreaming. In the fourth stanza, the dawn comes again and the child wakes up to what paradise must have been like. At this stage the images become surreal. Here, as in a trance, the horses went out to the fields to graze. In the fifth stanza, the poet draws back from his vision of the little boy and the pain this transition has always caused him is clear in his memory of the child he was. In the sixth and last stanza, Time's steady flow super imposed again on the innocent mind of the child. The poet sees himself taken by the hand, and the farm forever fled away from the childless land.
