Happy as the grass was green

SEEMS only a week or two ago, in this column, that we mentioned the hopes for a good summer. For the length of sunshine to match the length of day. And, happily, thankfully, we got it. The sun shone and it shone lots. There was a period of a few weeks there where you woke up in the morning, completely confident that the sky outside was blue, the breeze was light and the air was warm. Glorious!

And now, here we are in the week that the little and the notso-little students return to school. Not saying it’s ever easy, but it’s sure better when the weather has behaved.

Long summer holidays are such a critical time in our growing up, and play such a crucial role in our reflections and memories. No child going in to their summer holidays is the same child when they come out the far side.

This short span of time appears to command an immensely powerful place in our memory. Sure, there are many tragedies and tough times included, but our collective capacity to look back at those days is generally within the positive zone. Grassy knees, freckles, peeling skin. The length of day. All of us, King of the Castle, in some shape or form.

It is almost as if time has frozen in a good place. Our life’s trip is on siesta in a really good place. But, of course it hasn’t or wasn’t. What felt like a halt, was anything but. All about us was moving on, and us alongside. Time was ticking away, and little did we understand, and sure how could we, that we were ever so slowly being dragged along in a tide that was gradually parting us from our childhood innocence.

The poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas (1914-53) is an autobiographical poem in which the poet uses the wonderful memories of childhood days in order to allow him explore the theme of a journey from innocence, to the loss of innocence. A poem of six stanzas, it can more or less be divided into two separate sections.

The first three stanzas paint what appears to be a timeless world of childhood wonder without a sense of loss and decay. In typical Thomas language and imagery, the words are fantastically splendid and vivid. I often think what he was capable of doing with words was, is, as alive and vibrant and awe inspiring as what somebody like Van Gogh could create with a brush and oils. All is good in his Garden of Eden.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.

But the second half of the poem begins the process of drawing us away to the world of the present, and to understanding our position of reflection. Although Thomas explores his own past and views times gone by with definite fondness, and shares the full bounty of his literary talent when sharing that feeling with his reader, crucially and more importantly, he invites the reader to reflect on their own life, and to consider their past, from both then, and now.

Fair enough, the latter may be reality, but it does not derail the beauty of the former. This poem will forever be a favourite. It is an entirely fantastic, beautiful piece of work. Gold on a page.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land. 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.