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Thank you for telling me about the effect the poem had on you and for sharing the beautifully apt lines of Dylan Thomas. In return, I will share this quote of Thomas's which evokes the innocence found in Fern Hill - “I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”

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I wept to see the beauty of Edinburgh

through your eyes

we need our precious precious places

not always to stay forever

but to keep forever

so we can return to them

as Dylan Thomas does

in Fern Hill:

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

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