The poet remembers those days when he was young and carefree on his aunt’s estate. He remembers the sweet house on Fern Hill. The days of childhood were as happy as green grass. The dim starry night allowed her to have her own ways as she passed a hectic moment in the golden period of his life. In childhood he was popular with the cart drivers in the apple town, the farm. However, ‘time’ is the true lord and master. With the kind consent of ‘time’, Dylan made the trees and leaves follow him with daisies and barely trickle down the rivers of greenish light.
In childhood, she was lively and vibrant; he was glorified among the barns by the merry yard. He sang freely as if the farm was his eternal home. He was happy in the sun that he was young only once, the height of his life. It was ‘time’ that was the true lord and master. Time allowed him to play and be brilliant. He sometimes allows her to play the role of hunter and shepherd. He then remembered that as he blew the hunter’s horn, the foxes barked and the calves mooed. He amused himself in the sacred streams of the fern
As the sun shone, the poet kept running from one place to another. The hay fields were as tall as the house. The sight of the wisps of smoke rising from the chimneys was pleasant and sweet to the boy like musical melodies. The air played, lovely, watery and fiery green as grass. It was as beautiful as it was wet. As he went to sleep, he had fantasies. It seemed to him that the owls were taking the farm all night; they were wounded; the vases, a species of birds, flew with the haystacks and the running horses sparkled in the moonlight.
In his childhood, when he was pure and innocent, like a lamb, nothing mattered to him. Time elevated him to a great fantasy world. He took him to a great height crowded with swallows on a moonlit night. These days of childish fantasy are gone forever. He can no longer ride to sleep or imagine that the owl runs the farm at night and returns in the morning. Now that he is grown up, Dylan wakes up from his dream to find that the farm has fled the world.
The general tone of the speaker is one of joy and celebration. Childhood and the farm have been idolized in exaggerated terms. The poem’s voice is clearly full of enthusiasm and ecstasy, although there is a subtle undercurrent of the decline of adulthood.