ANALYSIS

The narrator in Thomas’ “Fern Hill” cast a glance at his early life of childhood that recreates a
state of innocence and holiness—something that reveals his aboriginal nature. The poet draws
inspiration from the Fern Hill, a farmhouse of his aunt--Ann Jones located in a charming Welsh
landscape in the country side and rich in childhood associations, symbolically serves as an
anchorage to objectify his nostalgic feelings of regaining the lost paradise. This imaginative
retreat of the poet seems in line with Lacanian concept of desire for “the Real.”
Psychoanalytically speaking, “the Real” in Lacan refers to the neo-natal state of
undifferentiated self where the child is not only one with his mother but also with the
environment. He knows no death, no time, no beginning, no end—in Thomas’ terms he is
“below a time”. The psychic split between the self and the other has not yet occurred; and the
child has not yet reached to the stage of “cogito ergo sum.” This state of ignorance is a bliss as,
according to Traherne, he “seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were
spotless and pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not
that there were any sins, or complaints or laws”. How rapturously Thomas arrests the then self-
contained and entirely satisfying state of grace splendour, and jouissance with bewitching
imagery from the symbolic matrix. He says: 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 hounoured 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. The above passage overtly
reveals the richness and self-saturated register of “the Real” or what we religiously call the
eternal Garden of Eden. The “apple boughs,” the happy “ lilting house” the “green… grass” the
ease, “the apple towns” trees, leaves, rivers and windfalls of light all seem to symbolize “the
Real.” The words like “prince” and “lordly” are worth noticing which convey a sense of all-ness,
sufficiency and un-differentiation where the child is one with his mother and the external world
around. The whole poem psychologically mirrors “the Real” for the reader. Such a world where
there is no split between the self and the other. The relation is still dyadic; no gender
differentiation; and no conscious mind which is torn between the opposites. It is all one and the
same; no sense of mine and thine—all things belong to it (the child) who is the real owner. That
is why the child is “honoured among wagons” and is “prince of the apple towns.” Nothing is
alienated nor he feels alienated. How great is the desire of the poet expressed to be transferred
from the world of what Lacan terms “the Symbolic Order”—a triadic world of time, language
and desire rather than timeless, to a “carefree,” preverbal and saturated world of essential
needs. In “the Real” register the child has no sense of time; no nous of sunrise or sunset. Its
regal activities are free from the chains of time as Thomas says, “Time let me play and
be/Golden in the mercy of his means.” Which is why, in this state of immutability and
invariability the “Sabbath rang slowly/In the pebbles of the holy streams.” As and when the
dyadic relation is broken by the entry of father who imposes law and authority representing
language and society/culture, triadic relations are established; a radicle split/lack occurs; sense
of mutability and change/clock time is born; opposites begin to be sporadically realized, and the
sociosymbolic world or what Lacan calls the “Big Other” is born.v Antony Easthope says: In the
psychoanalytic account it is this split which makes human society possible. If there is no
unconscious, then there can be no opposition between nature and culture. First, the split is
necessary condition for the existence of culture and civilization since it means that all those
violent, appetitive, anti-social drives—the infant, ‘like a fiend’, ‘ piping loud’—can be relegated
to another place, the unconscious . The natural split that lowers the infancy in the Real to
unconscious consequently gives birth to the “Desire” of the Lost Object/Mother/lost Garden or
Eden, i.e., realm of the Real. It is this yearning desire of the lost paradise which exerts its unique
influence on the poet which continually frustrates him in the Symbolic order that finds its voice
in the language of poetry. Although the desire to attain the Real fully, through symbolic
substitutes, is impossible and delusive because the language is incomplete and helpless to catch
the whole truth, yet the poet, by cherishing sweet reminiscences of the realm along the vale of
years when time held him “green,” “easy” and “heedless,” sadly expresses it in the language of
fantasy as there is no other way to express it. Lacan in an interview on the television once said:
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all. Saying it all
is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds on
to the real. Reverberating his voice of desire, Thomas poetically reiterates to heal it in the last
section of the poem: 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, Nothing
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. The underlined phrases in the above
passage overtly reveal the shackled and dogmatic codes and structure of the Symbolic world
suggesting lack, and in turn the desire to fill the lack or regain the lost blissful state where the
child is not yet a slave to chains and manacles of the Symbolic order but is still capable to
tasting beauty and pleasure unencumbered by cerebral control, reason, and incompleteness
and emptiness of language.

CONCLUSION Dylan Thomas enacts a remarkable poetic drama of his childhood in which he
gives an excursion to his long cherished memories that helps him heal his continually simmering
desire to reach the Real—something like our primordial state and origin where we relax all rigid
subjectivity of the signifying chains of the socio-Symbolic order and see ourselves not as grown
up, grudging and differentiated in the “childless land” of adults but as children “green”, easy”
and “carefree”— in all oneness and togetherness. The Romantics’ yearning for the early
childhood basically aims to achieve this goal. Their conscious effort to connect past with the
present, the undifferentiated self with the differentiated-self, the real with the symbolic realm,
and the conscious with the unconscious helps them psychologically revive and spiritually
regenerate in order to become more productive and useful individuals of the Big Other.

Mushtaq ur Rehman Department of English, Gomal University, Dera Ismail Khan