And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new-made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways.

These lines come from Dylan Thomas’s lyric poem “Fern Hill,” written in the mid-1940s and first published in 1945. The poem is a nostalgic recollection of childhood summers spent in the Welsh countryside (often associated with visits to relatives’ farms near Carmarthenshire), rendered in Thomas’s lush, musical imagery. “Fern Hill” contrasts the child’s sense of boundless freedom—days seemingly “endless” and nature benevolent—with the adult’s later awareness of time’s inevitability. The quoted passage belongs to the poem’s early movement, where the speaker remembers being celebrated and carefree amid animals, weather, and sunlight, before the poem turns toward the sobering recognition that time “held” him even then.

The speaker recalls a childhood state of unselfconscious joy: “honored” in a “gay house,” moving among “foxes and pheasants,” and living as if each day were newly created (“new-made clouds”). The phrase “In the sun born over and over” suggests repeated rebirth through daily light—time experienced not as loss but as renewal. Yet “heedless” hints at dramatic irony: the child does not perceive the forces (time, mortality, change) that the adult narrator now recognizes. The lines exemplify Thomas’s central theme in “Fern Hill”: childhood as an Edenic interval where nature and imagination confer a sense of timelessness, later reframed by adult knowledge of time’s dominion.