And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns.

And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns” is a line from Dylan Thomas’s celebrated lyric poem “Fern Hill,” first published in the mid-1940s and later collected in his 1952 volume *Collected Poems, 1934–1952*. The poem is a nostalgic evocation of Thomas’s childhood summers on a relative’s farm in west Wales (often associated with the Fernhill farm near Llangain, Carmarthenshire). Written during Thomas’s mature period, it looks back from adulthood on a remembered pastoral world of hayfields, orchards, and farm labor, shaped as much by musical language and mythic self-fashioning as by literal autobiography.

The speaker recalls a childhood sense of sovereignty and belonging: amid the ordinary farm traffic (“wagons”), he feels “honored” and imagines himself “prince” over “apple towns,” a phrase that turns orchards and farmyards into a miniature kingdom. The line captures Thomas’s characteristic elevation of rural detail into myth, conveying the intoxicating freedom of youth and the way memory crowns the child with grandeur. In the larger arc of “Fern Hill,” such exaltation is shadowed by time’s passage: the poem’s lush celebration of innocence ultimately acknowledges that this princely status was temporary, granted by childhood itself and revoked by adulthood.