Thursday Thirteen: 'Fern Hill'

Last week, I presented the last 13 lines of "Desiderata," though I like the whole thing. Though the process of disembodying lines from a poem seems to me to be all wrong because it deprives them of their context as a part of a story and strips them of the creative logic of a complete poem, I like doing it. These lines really shouldn't stand alone, but focusing on them does offer a glimpse of the spirit of the whole and brings us in close on their emotional and imaginative beauty and intensity.

Here are 13 lines from my favorite poem, "Fern Hill," by Dylan Thomas. May we all sing in our chains like the sea.

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

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.

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