Theme- fern hill
1. Time
Rather than just a clock ticking on the wall, Time in "Fern Hill" is almost like a character.
Thomas personifies time throughout the poem, as something with immense power. At first, he's
the guy who lets the speaker frolic, all happy-like among the meadows. But then time becomes
the one who yanks our young and carefree speaker out of his graceful youth and into ugly
adulthood. In other words, despite his strong start, time winds up being a real jerk.
2. Youth
You're only young once, and all those other clichés. For the speaker of "Fern Hill," youth is
everything it should be—joyful, carefree, and oh so fleeting. And that's kind of the problem. It's
easy for our speaker to feel the wonders of youth as everlasting, but all along he was doomed to
be yanked irreversibly into adulthood, just like the rest of us. It's the bummer of all bummers.
3. Foolishness and Folly
Normally, the idea of being foolish isn't exactly a good thing. But then again, there's that saying,
"ignorance is bliss." And maybe that's more applicable to the speaker of "Fern Hill," who's
telling us about his full-of-promise youth. But no matter which way you slice it, you can't deny
that this young prince was more than a little naïve. Sure, his youthful ignorance may have been a
time of bliss, but it all comes crashing to an end, and we're thinking he probably should have
seen that coming.
4. Happiness
It's next to impossible not to hear the happiness of the speaker in "Fern Hill." From the first line,
through all of the first five stanzas, the speaker is praising his youth as a time of joy. And the
poem's playful sounds and language only mirror that emotion, adding music and jauntiness to the
poem's lines. If there's one thing the speaker hasn't lost, it's his ability to remember just how
great being young felt.
5. Change
If the speaker of "Fern Hill" made one mistake as a youth, it's that he failed to realize that being
young doesn't last forever. So at the beginning of the poem, we've got a footloose and fancy free
youth, but by the end, we're left with an older, wiser, sadder speaker. That change occurs
gradually and subtly, but if you look closely at the imagery of the poem, you might be surprised
to find you'd seen it coming all along
*pike
Theme-The key theme of this poem is the ageless and unchanging violence of nature—
something that cannot be tamed by human intervention and which is so elemental that the
speaker's "hair [is] frozen" on his head at the recognition of it. The pike the speaker sees in his
pond at night are "legendary," watchful; they are a "darkness beneath night's darkness,"
something "immense," whose power is palpable. It is very clear to the speaker, as he fishes in the
wide pool which has endured so many years, that the power, the particular violence, of the pikes
within is greater than his own power. There is an aspect to nature which is driven by violence
and darkness and is beyond the capacity of humans to control.
This is indicated throughout the poem. The pike are "killers from the egg," born violent and born
sure of their own enormity in their own world, too. Although they are only three inches long at
birth, the speaker is sure that they are very conscious of their own "grandeur," such that they feel
hundreds of feet long, confident of their own power. The violence of the pikes is emphasized,
too, through such words as "jaws" and "clamp." The attempt by the speaker and, we must
presume, his friends, to tame three pike ended in disaster: the result was that one of the pikes
killed another, leaving only one of the three alive. The speaker has attempted to control the pikes
and turn them into something humans can dominate, like a pet. But the violent nature of the
pikes cannot be controlled. In the end, their elemental and ageless instincts win out, and they
remain as they have always been, uncaring of human desires.
*Aunt jenniferr-
Theme
Women and Femininity
"Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" sounds like a ball of good times, or at least some big cat-themed
excitement. In reality, though, it's about a woman whose life has been restricted by the
patriarchal (male-dominated) society in which she lives. Now, the poem doesn't give us any facts
about this—it doesn't tell us, for example, that Aunt Jennifer wasn't allowed to go college, or that
Aunt Jennifer's husband didn't give her any say in financial matters. But the poem does strongly
suggest that Aunt J's opportunities in life have been limited by her gender, and also by her
marriage, which left her "terrified." Bad times. Her wedding band's "massive weight," the ordeals
that mastered her—Aunt J has suffered because of her gender.
Art and Culture
In "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," the limitations that bind Aunt Jennifer in life don't bind her in art.
So, at least she's got that going for her. Aunt J's needlework allows her to experience a world of
deep green forests and prancing brave tigers (oh my!) that is incredibly different from the real
life that she leads—the one that is weighed down by the sadness and strictures of her marriage
and her gender. Art in this poem is a kind of freedom, a freedom accessible to everyone, even the
disempowered.
Immortality
When it comes to poetry, immortality is pretty much right up there with love on the cliché-
ometer. A lot of poets seem to be obsessed with the idea of their immortality. So it's really no
surprise that the theme of immortality—of life after death—shows up in "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers,"
too. The speaker imagines that the tigers will continue prancing after Aunt J's death, and thus
Aunt J will be able to live on through her art. Sweet. Even though Aunt Jennifer's tapestry might
not be as famous as those sonnets by that immortality-seeker Shakespeare, Aunt J still gets to be
immortal in her own way. Also, let's see Willy Shakespeare try to sew a tapestry. We didn't think
so, Bill.
