[TCA-Asyn-Sep] ENG3U ...

Click play to listen to Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet who wrote 'Fern Hill'. This poem is one of the best known descriptions of what it was like for Dylan to grow up on a farm in Wales. It is filled with imagery that comes directly from a young child’s imagination – often exaggerated and impossible to believe.

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GLOSSARY:
Lilting: having a rhythmical cadence
Dingle: a wooded valley
Windfall: Fruit blown off the branch by the wind
Green: Young, inexperienced, naive

Listen only to the first three stanzas, and then using the following text of these three stanzas, paraphrase the phrases and words in BOLD text:

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 nightjars                               
Flying with the ricks, and the horses                                                                         
Flashing into the dark. 

You must attempt to paraphrase these selections of text before you can view the next lecture where the teacher will provide an interpretative paraphrasing of those three stanzas.

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