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.
And 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,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the night-jars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
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.
If I have a favorite poem at all, it’s this one. No matter how many times I read it, there is still at least one line that startles me as if read for the first time. This time, as I typed, it was the “horses flashing into the dark.” The repetition of certain eternal and eternally meaningful words– moon, apple, stars, green– drives the poem directly into my heart, one slow meter at a time. It is just beautifully, exquisitely painful in the way of childhood memories: bright, sharp-edged, intense, taste-able.
That its subject is precisely this memory of experiencing life as a child– how certain you were of its simultaneous magic and frightening reality, how simultaneously aware of its timelessness and blissfully unaware of your mortality– is its genius and its power.
And then just the pleasure of language. Read it out loud.
April is poetry month, and I know a shameful few poems by heart: Emily Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” which is about a snake, my poem “Why Cats Purr” which I wrote at age eight, Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and Yeats’ “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty.”
Maybe I’ll challenge myself to memorize “Fern Hill” this year.
What poem do you know, or want to know, by heart?
Please, PLEASE post Why Cats Purr – your devoted readers demand the inside scoop!
Oh dear. I’m too embarrassed to post it so I’ll just hide it in the comments.
Why Cats Purr, by Melissa Reeser, age 8
I looked into my kitten’s mouth,
looked west and east and even south.
I looked inside just to make sure
exactly why it is they purr.
I looked around until I found
a little capsule small and round.
I opened it and just right there
was one small clump of bright green hair.
It looked at me right then, I’m sure,
It looked at me and it said, “Purr.”
I did a report on Dylan Thomas in high school and ever since then I’ve carried “Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” A devastatingly beautiful poem, and not to be a copycat, but one of my favorites in the world.
I used to recite “In the Beginning” by Alice Fulton while I ran.
In the Beginning
the swimming teacher said,”Go with it,
it will hold
you. Don’t you know
you’re naturally pneumatic?”
Since then everything has happened
this way. What a buoyant journey!
Here I am
sensitized to the least cheep and twinge
of other beings and especially to my own
twinges. I didn’t create this pain-
ful grace. I didn’t
banish the primitive.
This minute my small toes are shrinking
of their own accord. I have no say
whatsoever. Blame it on buoyancy,
without which, rambunctious and passive
as a beachball on the breakers, I
never would have bobbled here.
The wild green groans
by which I lived before language
now gesture and have at me
only in dreams. I wake seeing myself
as a bottle holding an inexplicable
ship. Who stuffed that soul-
ful ballast of sail down my throat?
Who trimmed the rigging, intricate as nerves,
and moored the skeletal mast?
Its construction is beyond me.
I’m only the go-between
gleaming round this unknowable
cargo, headed for a speck
on the sea’s rim in the hope
it can contain a shore.
Thank you for typing out the lines here. Seems like a great poem to recite while running. How perfect “cheep and twinge” and that line break in the middle of “painful.” Who is this Alice Fulton? I’ve got to go find her.
Glad to know you like “Fern Hill,” too. That last line is so good…
I wish I had more poems and songs in my memory bank…I know one Mothers of Invention song “Evelyn a Modified Dog” and most of Dylan Thomas’s – “Do Not Go Gentle into that good night’ –and, cause I’m a life long surfer– my favorite section :
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
Per your suggestion , I’ll try reading “Fern Hill” aloud–I once had a scratchy audio recording of Dylan Thomas reading his poems–he had a marvelous voice. The line I liked in Fern Hill was the one you cited and this one:
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
I remember that recording, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” It was on a cream-colored cassette tape with type-written title.
Forgot about one more poem I memorized, written by a certain writer in his twenties. Do I have it right? Or am I missing a stanza in the middle?
Democracy, honor, the safety of home,
and don’t forget Mom’s apple pie.
Somehow we thought this reason enough
to send our youth off to die.
And I try to remember that now the world’s safe,
that now we will have no more war.
But I hear no more young laughs
and see no more youth tracks and ask
“So, what was it for?”
My first introduction to Fern Hill was this past weekend in concerts with the Oregon Repertory Singers – the musical setting by John Corigliano. Have you heard it? We sang it with piano and choir, as it was originally written, but he also arranged it for full orchestra as in this video -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tp7yyn1xcY.