Perhaps the first question to arise from the title of this article is quite simply why Robert Browning and Dylan Thomas should be associated in the first place.
Could Thomas not be more aptly associated with such poets as Shelley or Wordsworth, especially when one considers that the latter initiated the poetry of recollected childhood?
In general terms, the clearest critical insights are gained when one can compare and contrast two poets with equal facility. What, then, do Browning and Thomas share in common?
First, both came from non-conformist backgrounds in which the mother exerted a dominant formative influence. Both felt a profound love of music and, not surprisingly, musical motifs pervade their poetry. Both suffered a crisis of identity and self-confidence in their youth.
However, there are also striking dissimilarities that set them apart. One point of contrast is seen in their divergent attitudes toward the past, particularly their own childhood experience.
While Thomas drew on his childhood memories as a source of poetical inspiration, Browning’s elimination of all traces of his boyhood verses was symptomatic of his desire to abnegate the relevance of his childhood to his poetry; he was oriented toward the future, to a vision that awaited fulfillment.
In this respect, Browning typified his age and its spirit of buoyant optimism.
Perhaps the Victorians could afford to be such out-and-out optimists, as the 19th century did not experience the equivalents of genocide, global conflict, and the threat of nuclear destruction. The Victorian Age was one of pomp and splendor.
Browning was concerned not to reveal his private personality in his poetry, while Thomas, in the post-Freudian era, felt a compulsion to lay himself bare.
Both their orientations toward either the past or the future find expression in certain recurrent metaphors, particularly those that can be associated with the idea of Eden or the Promised Land. Both are sustained metaphors which give expression to their fundamental attitudes concerning life and time.
Both Robert Browning and Dylan Thomas sought absolute truth, which they found wanting in ordinary life. Browning believed that music was the highest of the arts because it appeals directly to the imagination. Since the age of the Romantics, the concepts of music and childhood have conveyed the intuitive and mystical side of man’s nature.
The following lines from Thomas’s “Fern Hill” may serve as a point for the comparison of the two poems:
"And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allowIn all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songsBefore the children green and goldenFollow him out of grace."
The word “children” suggests an allusion to such a figure as the Pied Piper. This impression is reinforced by a reading of such lines in Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” as:
"However he turned from South to West,And to Koppelberg his steps addressed,And after him the children pressed."
Promised land
In Browning’s poem, the children reach the Piper’s Promised Land. As the children of Hamelin mysteriously disappear into the side of Koppelberg Hill, so the child in “Fern Hill” is taken by time up to “the swallow thronged loft” of the farmhouse bearing the name “Fern Hill.”
The “childless land” in the poem of Thomas parallels childless Hamelin seen through the eyes of the lame child who could not follow the Pied Piper.
In Browning’s poem, the children reach the Piper’s Promised Land in distant Transylvania.
In “Fern Hill,” water symbolism, a ubiquitous characteristic in Dylan Thomas’s verse, is found in the poem’s famous closing lines:
"Time held me green and dyingThough I sang in my chains like the sea."
“Fern Hill” represents the best of both worlds, for it shows that, while accepting the inevitability of death, the poet is still able to cherish childhood memory and the value of childhood experience.
The adult poet still possesses the power of memory to recall childhood, which is resurrected in the consciousness.
In view of their attitude toward music and childhood, both Robert Browning and Dylan Thomas may be regarded as heirs of the Romantic movement.
The child became the symbol of so much that the Romantics most valued in human nature – innocence. For the Romantics, innocence was a moral state untainted by the corrupting influences of society.
The writer is a journalist, scholar, writer, and international teacher based in the US, Spain, and Israel.