Dylan Thomas explores the life of a man coming to terms with mortality in his poem "Fern Hill", a picture book poem, whose tone and imagery is both melancholic and nostalgic in verse. It is with an artist's palette that the author describes a dying man's carefree days, with the use of colors to represent the seasons of his life.
             It was green and gold in the spring of the speaker's life, the colors for growth and wealth respectively; and the speaker was still an innocent boy during this time. He was the "prince of the apple towns" and hayfields of his youth. Confident and airy, "[he] lordly had the trees and leaves", and had a view of life that bordered on arrogance; a sense of invincibility that stems from ignorance, like most children his age were prone to believe. "Time let [him] play and be", and the speaker believed that he would live forever; and that the world was his oyster. Such was his life then -- careless simplicity. And the speaker longed for that moment in time when he was still innocent, when time was "golden in the mercy of his means." But in truth he was slowly withering as "time held [him] green and dying though [he] sang in [his] chains like the sea," he still longed to live.
             It is in the summer that wheat fields turn like gold, and the speaker slowly matured and is no longer a boy, but a young man, and begins to feel time's paradox on his life. How time's natural progression has removed him from the carefree days of youth, and how he is caught in its cyclical, unchanging pattern of youth, aging, and dying; and if the speaker is religious-- of eventually living again in another form of life. The author mentions that time held him "green and dying," his life, synonymous to the sea caught in its rhythmical tides. Time was generous and merciful in his youth, but the "few and such morning songs" he enjoyed when he was a boy he realized, will one day cease; portrayed in the following stanzas: "And nightly under th...