SOURCE: Hardy, Barbara. “The Green Poet.” In Dylan Thomas: An Original Language, pp. 132-52. Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Hardy discusses nature themes and imagery in Thomas's poetry.

The Theme of Nature

There are very few of Thomas's poems which do not offer a meditation on nature. Many can be called poems about nature. As I have been showing, some consider art and nature, with equal or unequal emphasis. More rarely, some are about love and nature.

In “The force that through the green fuse” and “Fern Hill,” Thomas is meditating on art and nature at one and the same time. Neither subject is subordinate, and both are imaginatively ingrained in the language, music, and form. The poems are Janus-faced, looking evenly in two directions. They are flexible forms, like those outlines shaped one way like a face, the other like a...