PAPER 2

General Issue: Image and Context

Particular Topic: Write an essay that studies the images of greenness in
Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.”

Length: 3 typewritten pages (750 words)

Due: March 02

Some suggestions:
1. Get to know the poem well by means of several readings. That is, before you start thinking about the details of the topic, have a good understanding of the poem’s concerns.

2. Notice a general technique used by Thomas: a familiar phrase (all the day long) is made to seem strange by the substitution of a related word (“all the sun long”).

3. Another technique he uses involves a kind of condensing of associations. A stable contains horses, and horses whinny and eat green grass, hence the poem refers to “the whinnying green stable” (35).

4. Read the poem for the topic, and identify the contexts in which the imagery of greenness appears.

5. With what other things or colors is “green” associated? To what purpose?

6. What is the relation, as you see it, between green and golden?

7. To what extent is this farm a kind of Eden? Read Genesis 1-3.

8. What is the relation between the past and the present?

9. How does Thomas develop the figure of time? Note that the word often
appears at the start of a line, and is given an initial capital letter. What effect does this appearance create?

10. This question is not directly related to the topic. What does it mean to sing like the sea (54)?

11. Do not think of your paper as a series of answers to the above questions.