Fern Hill
William Coleman
"Dylan Thomas: Reading His Complete Recorded Poetry" (Caedmon Records, 1963)
It must have been spring because my mother had just died, and I know that she died in March. My English teacher, Mrs. Goodpasture, was waiting for us sophomores to arrive. She was, I'm sure, working at her desk. She was always working, always intentional about her time. Perhaps she was writing some immaculately penned encouragement or carefully phrased critique on a student's essay on “The World is Too Much With Us” or “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud.” She was, I'm sure, dressed as always: smartly.
She was, I see now, a beacon of formality and grace and order in a time when I was at sea, given to drift from place to place, weightless, it seemed to me, helpless to the current.
I want to say it was April, because that's the month of my birth, and if this event I want to tell you about, when I found a kind of renewal in words—if it were to have happened in April, it would compose a kind of triply symbolic coincidence that Mrs. Goodpasture would have loved noting and sharing with us in class: spring in spring in spring; birth and the dying that gave its roots rise.
There's a lot I don't remember about that time. But she must have started the hour, Mrs. Goodpasture, by standing and passing the stacks of blue dittoed paper down the five lines of students. "Fern Hill" the paper must have read. Did she preface with some words of context? She must have. She was expert at professing just enough so that when the time came for us to see for ourselves, we, her pupils, saw.
Fern Hill: it was the name of the green seaside farm on which the poet had spent his summers as a boy. Now here he was, writing from the vantage of adulthood—and a troubled one at that. Dylan Thomas, Mrs. Goodpasture must have said, for it comes to me now unbidden—was a Welsh poet in love with words. Mad for words, word-drunk: His lines surge with playfulness and invention—once below a time; king of the apple boughs; sky-blue trades; windfall light. His works are unabashedly musical: time... in all his tuneful turning … such few and such mourning songs.
He felt his life as hugely as does the sea—emotions explode off the seawalls he set for himself so that he would not spill into complete dissolution: the meter of the lines, I mean, the symmetry of the stanzas, the refrains—time, time, time; golden golden golden—those formal structures that kept him whole.
And here he was, in fact, still intact, here in Wichita, Kansas: thirty-two years after he fell dead in a bar in New York City, where he had drunk as many whiskeys as his years, and that poisoned ocean, once inside him, overran his living structures.
Here he was in the form within which he could play and be, where he could flourish in the tension between past and present, now and death, grief and paradise; where he could move in a world of meaning, and meaningfully lose control—here he was, that is to say, in a poem—in a classroom in Wichita, Kansas, in 1985.
Mrs. Goodpasture walked to the center of the front of the room, where upon a metal media trolley lay the open-casket of a box record player. She set the set of grooved orbits spinning and let the needle touch the first.
What emerged was a voice that could save me (I knew it, I think, almost at once), because it was a voice that knew me. It was a voice that could grieve with me. Waves of sound encircled me, buoyed me. I was where the moon was always rising, where the sun was reborn by morning, and paradise an exuberance of time.
I was never the same.
William Coleman teaches English in a public school in New Hampshire. The co-founder of The Star-Splitter Academy, he is a former teaching fellow at Harvard, and served as managing editor of Image, and executive editor of non-fiction for DoubleTake Magazine. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Analog Sea, and other publications.